Overland literary journal > Articles by: Jeff Sparrow

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Jeff Sparrow

Jeff Sparrow is a Walkley Award-winning writer, broadcaster and former editor of Overland.

Articles by Jeff Sparrow:

2 November 20242 November 2024 · Politics

Donald Trump, or the Republican takeover of the Democratic Party

Jeff Sparrow

Since 2016, Trump has successfully remade the GOP in his own image, and, by so doing, pushed the centre of American politics further to the right, even to the extent of achieving the repeal of Roe v Wade (a long-held conservative dream). The current election illustrates that success.

14 October 202418 October 2024 · Politics

The politics of “social cohesion”

Jeff Sparrow

Almost by definition, Labor’s identification of social cohesion as an end in and of itself corresponds with abandoning even the mildest reform agenda. Any movement for change must begin with an acknowledgement of inequality, of division, of struggle.

15 May 2024 · Palestine

Why conservatives are so afraid of the Palestine solidarity movement

Jeff Sparrow

The incredible diversity of the Gaza solidarity campaign represents a story entirely missed by most media outlets. I’ve researched and written a lot about radical history in Australia, and I cannot think of a social movement making such a varied array of supporters feel so welcome.

Published in Overland Issue 250 Autumn 2023 · Capitalism

Smug politics as elite capture

Jeff Sparrow

The logic of delegated politics encourages this upward gaze from even its most principled adherents. They understand themselves as working on behalf of others and it’s easy to consider their own elevation a victory for an oppressed constituency, with the actual exclusion of that constituency obscured by the ambiguities of ‘representation’. Delegated politics often evolves into what I call ‘smug politics’: a model of social change in which the masses are neither a source of agency nor a constituency to be serviced but a problem to be policed.

19 June 20234 July 2023 · History

Why we excuse Australian war crimes

Jeff Sparrow

The long history of Australian militarism reminds us that the necessary condemnations of Ben Roberts-Smith and the SAS need to be situated in relation to the country’s sub-imperial ambitions. ‘Are we a part of the Empire / Close welded as hilt and blade?’ AG Hales asked. As the tensions between the United States and China grow, that determination to weld Australia into Empire only becomes more dangerous.

10 November 202211 November 2022 · Literature

Socialist realism, Overland and the politics of representation

Jeff Sparrow

The publication of Jim Davidson’s biography of Overland’s Stephen Murray-Smith and Meanjin founder Clem Christesen provides an opportunity to re-examine the socialist realism with which Overland was once very much associated.

Published in Overland Issue 246 Autumn 2022 · Climate politics

'That's what drives us to fight': labour, wilderness and the environment in Australia

Jeff Sparrow

In 1838, the Sydney Herald dismissed arguments about prior Indigenous possession of the place now known as Australia. In its response to Aboriginal claims, the editorial argued that ‘[t]his vast country was to [Indigenous people] a common—they bestowed no labor upon the land—their ownership, their right, was nothing more than that of the Emu or the Kangaroo.’ The editorial expressed the philosophical underpinning of terra nullius: that, as John Locke says, land becomes property only when man ‘improve[s] it for the benefit of Life, and therein lay[s] out something upon it that was his own, his labour’.

15 August 202226 August 2022 · Climate politics

Against populationism

Jeff Sparrow

It’s not difficult to grasp the horrific conclusions that might be—and repeatedly have been drawn—from the populationist argument. If the masses truly threaten the well-being of the planet by their existence, would, say, the emergence of a new and deadly pandemic be such a problem? The more morally squeamish of the populationist crowd might not like to follow that train of thought to its ultimate destination but plenty of others will.

22 May 202225 July 2022 · Politics

The unsettled election

Jeff Sparrow

You can read the election result as signifying a distinct opening, creating opportunities for a very different political conversation. Certainly, we should not think that anything has been settled. It’s satisfying to repeat the words ‘ex-PM Scott Morrison’. Yet the Albanese government will be intensely unstable, particularly since the ALP small target campaign leaves it without any obvious mandate as it stares down the barrel of a global recession.

19 October 202119 November 2021 · Climate change

Environmentalism with a business face

Jeff Sparrow

Contrary to what many progressives imagine, the Murdoch press lacks the authority to tell its readers what to think. Every election, the tabloids back the Liberals. Every election, their blue-collar readership overwhelmingly votes Labor, with surveys consistently showing the Telegraph to be the least trusted media outlet in the country.

24 September 202128 October 2021 · Coronavirus

Covid, the Left and radical democracy

Jeff Sparrow

If there’s still a chance to eliminate Covid, it won’t be through the kind of lockdowns we’ve seen to date. The fight against the virus now depends on direct politics: the democratic mobilisation of the entire population. That’s the only way we might sustain popular enthusiasm for the measures required.

29 June 20212 August 2021 · Politics

The art of failing upwards

Jeff Sparrow

On climate, as on everything else, our leaders know they can soar away from the disasters they create, lifted skyward by their own privilege and the hot air from the conservative commentariat. The rest of us will not be so lucky.

14 May 202122 June 2021 · Palestine

As in Australia, so in Palestine: the colonial logic of striking at terror

Jeff Sparrow

In Israel, as in Australia, colonisation is the context without which nothing else makes sense. The Israeli state depends on the dispossession of Palestinians, and so, by its nature, will constantly create and recreate violence, just as the Australian settler state did.

20 November 202021 January 2021 · Politics

The atrocity exhibition

Jeff Sparrow

In the weeks to come, we should expect a concerted campaign to minimise, excuse or justify the crimes the Brereton Report exposes. It’s critical to push back against it, to ensure that some sort of legal accountability takes place. If we don’t, we’ll be laying the grounds for future atrocities. But it’s even more important to insist on the connection between these atrocities and the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan.

5 November 202018 November 2020 · United States

The incomplete defeat of Donald Trump

Jeff Sparrow

The election means nothing has been resolved. Trump might be done but his defeat – if that’s what we’re seeing – wasn’t sufficiently crushing as to destroy his legacy. On the contrary, many would-be demagogues, both in the US and elsewhere, will see his surprisingly strong showing as evidence that the old culture war incantations still retain some of their magic.

4 May 20201 June 2020 · History

How can you run when you know? Fifty years after Kent State

Jeff Sparrow

Today, some leftists might see the relative privilege of the students in Kent State as diminishing the relevance of their repression to those from more obviously oppressed backgrounds. At the time, however, activists drew the opposite conclusion.

18 February 20202 April 2020 · alt-right

What happened to Richard Dawkins?

Jeff Sparrow

Richard Dawkins is not a fascist, nor even a supporter of the alt-right. He’s better understood as an extraordinarily entitled member of the political class, who happens to possess a huge platform through which he can express that entitlement. Nevertheless, with the far right making increasing inroads into the mainstream, it’s important to remember the role that Dawkins and his friends have made and continue to make in popularising its ideas.

25 November 201919 December 2019 · Far right

What to make of the Groyper Wars

Jeff Sparrow

Groyperism represents a new strategy, one that harks back to the original breakthrough of the alt-right.

Published in Overland Issue 236 Spring 2019 · Climate politics

The great acceleration

Jeff Sparrow

In 1995, comedian Denis Leary recorded a track called ‘Asshole’, a song about an all-American guy who likes ‘football and porno and books about war’. It concludes with a monologue: I’m gonna get myself a 1967 Cadillac Eldorado convertible Hot pink, with whale skin hubcaps

10 October 20196 November 2019 · Climate politics

With friends like these: the deepening links between climate denial and conservative politics

Jeff Sparrow

We live in a time in which the gulf between the powerful and the powerless has widened immensely, both because of the ongoing transfer of wealth to the political class and because of the general collapse of the organisations of the Left.

19 September 201922 November 2019 · Obituary

Vale David Hudson

Jeff Sparrow

I will remember him as a small figure standing behind a shop counter, surrounded by piles of books and receipts, discussing Lance Sharkey and the internal history of the Communist Party with a browser who patently isn’t going to buy anything at all.

3 July 20199 August 2019 · Reviews

Looking for treasure in the censor’s archive: Jared Davidson’s Dead Letters

Jeff Sparrow

The First World War ushered in new modes for thinking about sexuality and politics. Dead Letters captures a moment of transition, an instant in which ideas we now take for granted still contended against ideas now forgotten.

19 June 201926 July 2019 · alt-right

White Avengers: Civil War

Jeff Sparrow

The prominence of women in a movement so dedicated to male supremacy generates certain obvious contradictions which have, just now, spectacularly come to a head.

5 June 201920 June 2019 · Journalism

The raids on journalism – and why we need to show our solidarity

Jeff Sparrow

These are, in many ways, scary times. The hard right, who had mentally prepared themselves for defeat, now feel themselves to be totally off the leash. That, too, is why solidarity matters. If we do not hang together, we will – as the saying goes – most assuredly be hanged separately.

19 May 201920 June 2019 · Federal Election 2019

Where to now for the left?

Jeff Sparrow

So if Crowe’s right, it’s not just ‘big ideas and ambitious plans’ that are dead to our politicians. It’s also, according to the best available science, a great chunk of life on Earth, with neither major party even trying to put forward the measures necessary to end extinctions. That’s a bleak conclusion – but, in a way, it’s a bracing one since it clarifies, in the starkest possible fashion, the strategic perspectives in front of us.

6 February 201920 March 2019 · Climate change

Many generations in flames

Jeff Sparrow

Imagine yourself transported back to the sixties, fully conscious of the processes behind global warming. How, exactly, would you live your life differently? Would you refuse to drive cars or catch jets? Would you eschew consumer comforts so as to leave the smallest possible footprint? Perhaps so, but you’d know that such gestures wouldn’t matter.

2 November 20184 December 2018 · Long read

When fascist despair leads to fascist terror

Jeff Sparrow

You don’t need to look for #MAGAbomber Cesar Sayoc’s inspiration. Spend some time online, and the sources for his explosive campaign against George Soros, Hillary Clinton and CNN will find you. You can’t escape versions of the memes he plastered all over his van, manifesting in tweets from angry Twitter eggs, in viral articles from Infowars and Breitbart, in Fox News clips and in, of course, speeches by Donald Trump, the 45th President of the United States.

5 September 20183 October 2018 · Politics

Festivals and censorship

Jeff Sparrow

Literary festivals and festivals of ideas are, almost by definition, curated, since directors necessarily choose between the potential speakers available to them to draw up their final program. If you attend a festival, you’re meant to notice the selection of guests, in the same way that art fanciers at an exhibition appreciate the careful juxtaposition of particular works. It’s thus entirely legitimate to criticise event organisers for programming certain speakers and not others. Indeed, it’s what you’re supposed to do.

24 August 201821 September 2018 · Main Posts

No use crying over spilt Libs

Jeff Sparrow

Nothing’s settled, nothing’s resolved. Only minutes after the departure of Malcolm Turnbull, the IPA released a video welcoming Scott Morrison with all the sincerity of a mobster hugging a local shopkeeper. In the clip, the usual muppets reel off their list of demands for the new PM (essentially, the same ‘big business plus culture war’ program they tried to foist on Turnbull) as if to say, ‘Nice government you’ve got there – be a shame if something happened to it!’

8 August 201829 August 2018 · The media

On the fear of a ‘foreign invasion’

Jeff Sparrow

It’s symptomatic of where we’re at in Australia that the appearance of fascist agitator and Hitler-fan Blair Cottrell on Sky News – an interview that briefly turned ‘Nazi’ into a Twitter trending topic – wasn’t the most significant media boost offered to white nationalism in the last week.

1 August 201829 August 2018 · Long read

Scoundrel time: from the Rosenbergs to Russiagate

Jeff Sparrow

For all the talk of Russia ... Trumpism could not have been a more quintessentially American phenomenon: a faux populism stitched together like Frankenstein’s monster from a variety of the local resentments arising from a divided and broken country.

21 June 201816 July 2018 · Feminism

The Devil’s Decade

Jeff Sparrow

No-one should pretend such behaviour was anything other than vile. At the same time, it’s important to recognise just how much of the conceptual apparatus we now possess to understand sexual abuse owes to the liberation struggles that Devine, Power and co so loathe. Most obviously, the modern notion of consent emerged from a women’s movement that fought bitterly against male entitlement to female sexuality.

27 April 20184 June 2018 · Main Posts

From misery to misogyny: incels and the far right

Jeff Sparrow

The (mostly) young men who classify themselves as incels do so not merely because they lack romantic or (perhaps more significantly) sexual relationships, but because they accept their celibacy as a permanent and inevitable condition. Incels understand biology as destiny.

9 February 20181 March 2018 · Racism

Total and utter racist bullshit

Jeff Sparrow

New official statistics confirm that the alleged Victorian crime wave – an outbreak of criminality supposedly so intense that, at one stage, Liberal MP Craig Kelly wanted road signs on the border warning travellers from New South Wales about the danger they faced – never existed. On the contrary, Victoria’s safer than at any time in the past ten years, in line with a general decline in crime across the nation.

26 September 201720 November 2017 · Main Posts

Rainbows, not media storms

Jeff Sparrow

‘Don’t’ and ‘Panic’. Those two words should feature heavily in any response to the softening opinion polls about equal marriage. Newspoll puts the percentage of voters supporting same-sex marriage at 57%, down from 63% in August and 62% in September 2016. That might be a fall but the margin for ‘yes’ remains huge, particularly given how many people have already voted.

13 July 201722 August 2017 · Far right

‘Dr Goebbels’ mastheads’: on antisemitism and News Corp

Jeff Sparrow

A few years back, News Corp was warning, almost every week, about antisemitism in Australia. Invariably, the claims were bogus: more about slating the Greens and the BDS movement than genuinely exposing bigotry. Today, with a small but significant coterie of genuine antisemites raising their heads, we find News Corps again in the thick of the action: not calling out the racists, mind you, but providing them with political cover.

9 February 201724 March 2017 · Technology

The fascists are organising

Jeff Sparrow

The United Patriots Front page boasts in excess of a hundred thousand likes, which guarantees its content a substantial readership. A clip in which Cottrell whines about his legal travails has been shared a stunning 600,000 times; another in which he blames Islam for the recent tragedy in Melbourne’s Bourke Street received 75,000 views and 1800 likes.

29 January 201715 March 2017 · Racism

The hour of enormous walls has well and truly arrived

Jeff Sparrow

Today’s executive order excluded citizens from Iraq, Syria, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen (but not, notably, Saudi Arabia) for 90 days, a period, one presumes, judged sufficient for Trump to do his aforementioned ‘figuring out’. Was that a Muslim ban? Not at all, said Trump to reporters after signing the directive. Shortly thereafter, Michael Flynn Jnr, the son of Trump’s National Security Adviser, tweeted the slogan ‘Making American Great Again’ – and included the hashtag #MuslimBan.

13 October 201610 November 2016 · History

Down with the clown

Jeff Sparrow

Today, with an orange-skinned buffoon with weird hair running for president, we’re plagued by evil clowns. Should we be surprised? If the anti-corporate slogan ‘another world is possible’ gave rise to radical pie throwing, today’s clowns belong to a period in which political hopes have been so entirely crushed that carnival becomes less utopian and more nihilistic.

22 July 201629 August 2016 · Racism

A short history of rocking against racism

Jeff Sparrow

If nothing else, the incident showed just how normalised Islamophobia has become in Australia. Had Kruger called to ban Jewish immigration, her TV career would (quite rightly) have come to an abrupt end – and no mainstream broadcaster would have dared pipe up on her behalf. But Aly’s intervention was especially odd given that Kruger had shown no sign of wanting forgiveness.

12 July 201629 August 2016 · Capitalism in decline

Live in the moment: the Situationists & Pokemon Go

Jeff Sparrow

Over the last few days, the streets have filled with Situationists, as Pokemon Go sends its legions of players out on prolonged dérives. OK, the comparison’s slightly ridiculous. Yet consider Situationist pioneer Guy Debord’s description of the dérive, the psychogeographic technique his coterie was trialling in Paris in the fifties.

25 June 201629 July 2016 · Class

Brexit and the new hostility to participatory democracy

Jeff Sparrow

The majority of British voters were, we were told, buffoons and bigots – Little Englanders too foolish to understand the self-evident virtues of European integration. Many Australians drew a direct parallel with the proposed plebiscite on same-sex marriage, a venture that would, we were told, allow a massive dam of ignorance and hatred to break its banks and drown us all.

23 June 20161 May 2019 · LGBTIQ

Haters against hate

Jeff Sparrow

It’s easy to laugh at Nazis (and fun, too). But the debate in the UPF’s ranks highlights a real issue: the extent to which the right (and even the far right) now feels confident to denounce the left in the name of the oppressed.

6 June 201619 July 2016 · Politics

Political correctness gone right-wing

Jeff Sparrow

The Roz Ward case confirms what’s been apparent for some time: political correctness has become central to Australian conservatism. That might seem counterintuitive since so much of what passes for commentary at the moment consists of right-wingers denouncing PC and its advocates.

23 May 201622 June 2016 · Refugees

The problem with demanding a Dutton apology

Jeff Sparrow

Yes, Dutton’s comments were insulting. But more inclusive language won’t change the brutal reality of the detention regime. Refugees don’t need an apology from the immigration minister and they don’t need verbal acknowledgements of their capabilities. They need release from the camps in which they’re languishing.

18 May 20163 June 2016 · Main Posts

Ghosts at the borders

Jeff Sparrow

An Australian politician doesn’t usually become immigration minister all at once. Generally, the portfolio takes some time to work its evil magic on new appointments. Think of the slow desiccation of Liberal moderate Philip Ruddock, transformed, over a period of years, into an animated cadaver clutching an Amnesty badge in its withered claws.

7 December 20159 February 2016 · Labour rights

Black bans and blackmail

Jeff Sparrow

Having workers’ representatives monitoring safety matters. Last month, when a concrete slab crushed two men to death on an East Perth worksite, it transpired that the CFMEU had been refused entry to the site sixteen times. As the national security crusaders tell us: if you’re doing nothing wrong, then you’ve got nothing to hide. Yet it’s one rule for the employers and it’s another for everyone else.

5 November 20154 February 2016 · Politics

Harry Potter and the apartheid state

Jeff Sparrow

By the early eighties, artists breaking the boycott usually felt obliged to insist they were motivated by higher principles. Thus Gerry Beckley, from the group America, explained his band’s tour as almost a form of solidarity. ‘We like to think,’ he said, ‘that our songs and our way of life – the fact that we’re Americans having a good time – might give them hope that there is an outside world where this stuff doesn’t happen.’ That grotesque rationalisation comes to mind in relation to JK Rowling’s stance on the cultural boycott of Israel.

27 October 201518 November 2015 · Politics

Just another Alderaan

Jeff Sparrow

It’s often said that the American neoconservative Bill Kristol never met a war he didn’t like. Certainly, Kristol played a key role in promoting the US attack on Iraq in 2003 – and since then he’s been advocating new military interventions just about everywhere.

21 October 20157 November 2015 · Politics

Stage-managing cruelty

Jeff Sparrow

But the content of the new material released to Crikey is probably less disturbing than the general sense conveyed of a department that instinctively responds to publicity by spin and dissimulation. Quite clearly, without the protest and the corresponding social media outrage, Border Force would have gone ahead with its plans to stop passers-by and demanding to see their papers.

15 September 201529 September 2015 · Politics

The bull has turned

Jeff Sparrow

So the Abbott government completes the full Hobbesian trifecta, proving itself short as well as nasty and brutish. If you want some extra schaden with your freude, note that the New Yorker’s currently illustrating its story about the PM’s early demise with a picture captioned: ‘The newly ousted Australian Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, samples a raw onion during a visit to Tasmania.’ Such gravitas! Much dignity! Wow!

27 August 201526 September 2016 · The plebiscite

Who’s afraid of the plebiscite?

Jeff Sparrow

Now, only Gillard knows her private thoughts. But, in 2011, her public rationale for opposing same-sex marriage was entirely unambiguous. She explained that she was ‘on the conservative side’ of the debate ‘because of the way our society is and how we got here’. Rather than attacking marriage as being innately oppressive, she defended it on the basis of tradition: ‘I think for our culture, for our heritage, the Marriage Act and marriage being between a man and a woman has a special status.’

14 August 201517 September 2015 · Politics

A good week for Nazism

Jeff Sparrow

It’s been a good week for Nazism. A few days ago, the Spectator’s regular columnist Taki Theodoracopulos (‘Taki’) explained that ‘the only thing that stands between [Greeks] and utter anarchy in the poor neighbourhoods are the youths of Golden Dawn’. Yes, that Golden Dawn – the one whose leaders shout ‘Heil Hitler!’ in Parliament and describe the German Fuhrer as ‘a great personality’. The one accused of scores of racial murders, the one whose shaven-headed members parade around Athens singing the Horst Wessel song.

30 July 201527 August 2015 · Politics

White Australia is coming for you

Jeff Sparrow

In his new book Between the World and Me, the American writer Ta-Nehisi Coates discusses the experience of whiteness. ‘My experience in this world,’ he says, ‘has been that the people who believe themselves to be white are obsessed with the politics of personal exoneration. And the word racist, to them, conjures if not a tobacco-spitting oaf, then something just as fantastic – an orc, troll or gorgon. … There are no racists in America, or at least none that the people who need to be white know personally.’

19 June 20158 July 2015 · Politics

Charleston’s violent white history

Jeff Sparrow

Charleston, where this latest shooting atrocity took place, is also a historic crime scene. For Charleston was, of course, the capital of the slave trade, with about forty per cent of the Africans brought to the country landing first on American soil on Sullivan’s Island, just outside Charleston Harbour.

16 May 20151 August 2015 · Main Posts

The last time they turned back the boats

Jeff Sparrow

Some 8000 Rohingya asylum seekers and Bangladeshi migrants are currently stranded, lacking food, water and sanitation – and the governments of Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia are pushing their boats back into the ocean, knowing they have nowhere to go.

8 May 201527 May 2015 · Politics

Another day, another SBS journalist sacked

Jeff Sparrow

Since the election of the Abbott government, the public broadcasters have become regular punching bags, with the conservative media running a concerted campaign against the ABC – particularly after Murdoch’s Sky TV lost out on the tender for the Australian Network.

16 April 20154 May 2015 · The internet

Fresh failure

Jeff Sparrow

In that sense, then, #freshinourmemories can be seen as exemplary rather than anomalous - a reminder that there's no human misery from which someone won't try to make a buck and that profiteering was widespread during the war years. Indeed, Woolworths' specific slogan actually tells us more about the Great War than the anodyne rhetoric of the official commemoration.

16 December 201428 January 2015 · Politics

On Martin Place

Jeff Sparrow

Unfortunately, we have now sufficient experience of terrorist incidents to formulate a simple rule: namely, almost everything said in the first few days after the event will later prove wrong.

Published in Overland Issue 217 Summer 2014 ·

editorial | Jeff Sparrow

Jeff Sparrow

I’m leaving Overland at the end of 2014, which makes this the final edition I’ll edit. It’s been a strange seven years, watching the social settlement of the postwar era dissolve and so many of our certainties about culture and politics melt into air.

26 September 20142 October 2014 · Politics

Terror then and now

Jeff Sparrow

On 15 and 16 October 2001, 131 packages were reported to the police on the suspicion that they contained anthrax. Between 11 September 2001 and February 2002, the authorities investigated more than a thousand such claims. The now-forgotten anthrax panic makes an interesting contrast with the current reaction to ISIS-related terrorism, not least as an illustration of the extraordinary evolution in threat perception.

10 September 201418 September 2014 · Politics

Pyneing for the Right student politics

Jeff Sparrow

‘Students,’ Pyne warned, ‘have been targeted physically and verbally just because they are Jewish.’ It’s no small thing for the Education Minister to publicly identify the universities within his portfolio as seedbeds of racialised violence. You’d think that, to justify such an extraordinary allegation, there’d be some – oh, I don’t know – evidence.

Published in Overland Issue 216 Spring 2014 ·

Editorial

Jeff Sparrow

children roast in the fires of this terrible century and no love is enough no elegy sufficient That’s regular Overland contributor Alison Croggon in her 1997 poem, ‘Ode to Walt Whitman’. Her words circulated on social media recently, at a time when the powerful seemed to have declared war on children.

21 July 20141 August 2014 · Main Posts

Gaza: if not now, when?

Jeff Sparrow

‘Atrocity’, ‘massacre’, ‘crime against humanity’: one thinks of Conrad’s reference to ‘the old, old words worn thin, defaced by ages of careless usage’. But there are times when such terms ring true – and we’re living through one of them. Whatever Hamas has or hasn’t done, attempts to justify a military assault on a city of millions necessarily rely on a terrorist logic: it’s the imposition of a collective responsibility that holds every Gazan guilty simply because they live in Gaza.

17 July 201422 July 2014 · Politics

Mr Freedom’s at it again!

Jeff Sparrow

As George Brandis presented parliament with a bill to jail for five years anyone who discloses information relating to ‘special intelligence operations’, Tim Wilson was giving interviews to the press.

27 June 201411 July 2014 · Reflection

Overland and the CIA

Jeff Sparrow

The Autumn 1959 edition of Overland carried two reviews of Boris Pasternak’s novel, Dr Zhivago. The first, by the NZ critic Maurice Shadbolt, declared the book ‘one of the most astonishing and remarkable novels, written in Russian or any other language, of this tremendous century’.

5 June 201416 June 2014 · Main Posts

Sinking like a stone: the new generationalism in Australia

Jeff Sparrow

‘Thank heavens the political children who wanted us all to be in their image have been voted out of office. At last some adults are running the show again.’ That was Amanda Vanstone in September 2013 but it could have been any conservative commentator over the last two years, a period in which generationalism has been ubiquitous on the Right.

Published in Overland Issue 215 Winter 2014 ·

Editorial

Jeff Sparrow

On the one hand, imperial titles and bottles of Grange; on the other, austerity and cutbacks. There’s nothing subtle about the Right’s program today. That’s partly why the Left struggles to respond: too often, we’re wrong-footed by the sheer brazenness. The environmentalist Bill McKibben describes humanity as ‘running Genesis backward, decreating’. No wonder we hesitate to acknowledge the awful reality: a tiny handful of the super rich preferring planetary devastation to any diminution of their privilege or power.

29 April 20145 May 2014 · Politics

Fracking and drilling and fuels! Oh my!

Jeff Sparrow

Remember the sudden sense of crisis sparked in the US and elsewhere by the surge in fuel prices a few years ago? No? Hardly anyone else does either. Thanks to hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling, America manages to extract great quantities of hydrocarbons from areas previously off limits, so much so that US oil production […]

17 April 201424 April 2014 · Politics

The new gilded age

Jeff Sparrow

Only a few months ago, Joe Hockey launched what his friends at the Australian called a ‘bold mission to end [the] culture of handouts’. ‘The age of entitlement is over,’ Hockey explained. ‘The age of personal responsibility has begun.’ Barely had the glorious new epoch dawned when we learned that Hockey’s offsider, Arthur Sinodinos, sat on a board that casually allocated (as you do) $164,275 on a corporate box at Stadium Australia and $28,738 on limousine hire.

11 April 201429 April 2014 · Reading

Cowardice is contagious: on anonymous reviewing

Jeff Sparrow

Yesterday, the Wheeler Centre published another contribution in the slow-burning, long-running debate about anonymous book reviewing, a debate sparked by the practices of the new Saturday Paper. None of the previous defences of anonymity seemed at all convincing to me, and this one’s no better.

Published in Overland Issue 214 Autumn 2014 · Writing

‘Cats are out, sloths are in’

Jeff Sparrow

‘Hi, John, I’m the intern who’s been assigned to fact-check your article. I was hoping you could clarify how you determined that there are thirty-four strip clubs in the city while the source you’re using says thirty-one.’ So says Jim Fingal to John D’Agata in their co-written book, The Lifespan of a Fact, a text ostensibly based on Fingal’s fact-checking of a D’Agata essay on the suicide of a Las Vegas teenager, published in the Believer.

4 April 201410 April 2014 · Politics

Freedom and its enemies

Jeff Sparrow

Have you heard how section 18C of the federal Racial Discrimination Act allows the government to ban books and to detain people for two weeks without charge? Actually, that’s not 18C. It’s Australia’s anti-terror legislation – and you probably haven’t heard about it, since none of the supposed liberty-lovers bleating about the RDA show any interest whatsoever about the extraordinary infringements on basic democratic rights currently in place.

5 February 201412 February 2014 · Politics

Lost at sea: why Abbott’s winning against the ABC

Jeff Sparrow

We don’t know the victims’ names or nationalities, let alone anything their circumstances. No major news outlet has investigated; the government faces no pressure whatsoever to explain a tactic that has just casually killed three men. That’s why I can’t share other commentators’ confidence that Tony Abbott’s war on the ABC will fail. I think it’s already succeeding.

13 January 201427 January 2014 · Politics

New year, new culture war

Jeff Sparrow

From Abbott’s perspective, the periodical ignition of cultural war flashpoints keeps busy the Tea Party types who are now the pre-eminent activists of Australian conservatism. Abbott knows that if he can keep the bloggers and the Quadranters and the other tin-hatted loopers focused on the specifics of the latest battle, he need worry less about delivering the unhinged policies they actually want. A review into bias in the ABC he can deliver; the privatisation of the whole corporation, not so much.

Published in Overland Issue 213 Summer 2013 ·

Editorial

Jeff Sparrow

Politicians invariably attribute their most reactionary idiocies to the population. They are, they say, merely reflecting the electorate’s wishes. But the most recent elections revealed little positive enthusiasm for the conservative program. A survey immediately after the poll showed that respondents expected the new government to make matters worse rather than better on job security, workers’ rights, the environment, public services and welfare.

19 November 201326 November 2013 · Main Posts

Blame the politicians, not the voters

Jeff Sparrow

You can understand why Corinne Grant, as a long time campaigner for refugees, feels frustrated at the latest ghastly developments in asylum policy. But the approach she takes in her Hoopla column today is, I think, quite mistaken.

6 November 201312 November 2013 · Reading

Why literary magazines: a response to Robyn Annear

Jeff Sparrow

Is it possible that an apprehension about literary journals cannot be argued intelligibly without acknowledging a deeper anxiety about literary culture, one too disturbing to be expressed coherently? ‘I’ve dwelt a good deal on what motivates the contributors and funders of literary magazines in print,’ Annear says. ‘But what about readers? The fact is, there aren’t a lot of them.’

10 October 201322 October 2013 · Main Posts

The fine art of gangsterism

Jeff Sparrow

The Australian fascination with violent criminality usually gets discussed in terms of larrikinism, a ‘national character’ that is, don’t you know, innately hostile to authority, inherently sympathetic to the underdog. Yet the celebrity hoodlums could not be further from the ‘social bandits’ that Eric Hobsbawm once described. Indeed, they’re often not the slightest bit antagonistic to those in power, often working as strikebreakers and palling around with high-ranking current and former policemen.

25 September 20133 October 2013 · Politics

How to lose a culture war: a response to Ben Eltham

Jeff Sparrow

‘[T]he culture wars are unmistakably back.’ That’s New Matilda’s Ben Eltham, dumbfounded at ‘the amazing ideological nature’ of Abbott’s cuts. Actually, nothing could have been more predictable. bbott’s a cultural warrior, born and bred; his most enthusiastic supporters sup daily from a wingnut blogosphere that has honed baiting liberals into an art form.

8 September 201311 September 2013 · Main Posts

The day after the night before

Jeff Sparrow

It’s customary, after days like Saturday, for the Left to identify the silver lining hidden in the dark cloud, to argue via, some dialectical jiggery-pokery or another, that defeat might, in a certain sense, be understood as victory. Yet, with all due respect to Joe Hill, before you can organize, you need to mourn. So, without for a moment gilding the ALP’s record, let us acknowledge what Abbott’s election means. On many issues, the difference between Labor and Liberal was merely one of emphasis but in politics emphasis is not unimportant.

Published in Overland Issue 212 Spring 2013 ·

Editorial

Jeff Sparrow

Overland goes to press with the federal election some weeks away. Yet, while the parliamentary winner remains uncertain, it’s already perfectly apparent who will lose. The poll marks a renewed demonisation of asylum seekers, with the major parties competing to heap cruelties upon the heads of those with the temerity to seek refuge in Australia. The entirety of the political establishment remains committed to a neoliberalism that produces a noxious mixture of consumerism and repression – as George Steiner put it: ‘The knout on the one hand; the cheeseburger on the other.’

8 August 201313 August 2013 · Politics

The good news behind that Telegraph headline

Jeff Sparrow

Imagine if the ACTU issued a poster with Rupert Murdoch decked out in the uniform of a Nazi concentration camp Kommandant. Cue Andrew Bolt’s sorrowful ruminations on the barbarism on the Left, and a querulous seventeen part conversation between Gerard Henderson and his dog about the outrageous appropriation of the Holocaust.

20 July 20138 August 2013 · Politics

The PNG Solution and the ‘perspective of those who suffer’

Jeff Sparrow

The so-called ‘PNG Solution’ outlined by Kevin Rudde ntails one of the richest countries in the world outsourcing its fundamental national responsibilities to one of the poorest.

19 July 201330 July 2013 · Main Posts

Anders Breivik, Norwegian black metal and fascism today

Jeff Sparrow

On 16 July, French police detained a man called Varge Vikernes and his wife, Marie Cachet, supposedly on the basis that they were planning a terrorist assault. Vikernes had, it seems, been under surveillance since Anders Breivik, the Islamophobic mass murderer, mailed him a copy of his manifesto.

27 June 20131 July 2013 · Politics

Aftermath

Jeff Sparrow

This is as much of a placeholder as anything, intended more to give readers an opportunity to discuss the Labor turmoil more than to offer any profound insights.

Published in Overland Issue 211 Winter 2013 ·

Editorial

Jeff Sparrow

Why a literary journal? More specifically, why a print journal? The question arises because Overland has now become more a project than a particular format. Overland publishes online, with new content appearing most days. It hosts events and forums throughout the country, at literary festivals and elsewhere.

24 June 201327 June 2013 · Politics

Labor’s leadership issue: it’s not the media’s fault

Jeff Sparrow

On the weekend, the Age’s editorial calling for Julia Gillard to stand down for Kevin Rudd spurred outrage all over social media. Certainly, the leader writer’s suggestion that a Gillard resignation would foster ‘vigorous, policy-driven democratic debate’ stuck in the throat. ‘The Age is […] despairing of the vacuum in policy debate,’ explained the piece, as if the editor of a major newspaper played no role whatsoever determining what was debated and how.

14 June 201325 June 2013 · Culture

The most oppressed people since oppression began

Jeff Sparrow

It’s an article of faith on the Right that progressives obsess about political correctness, that lefties can’t take a joke and get uptight about trivial matters.

12 June 201324 June 2013 · Polemics

The Left needs its own agenda

Jeff Sparrow

Not so very long ago, I wrote that Abbott’s ascension to the Liberal leadership rendered the Coalition unelectable for the foreseeable future. Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. In my defense, the shift in mainstream politics over the last few years has been quite extraordinary, especially considering how shattered the Liberals were after their defeat.

5 June 201310 June 2013 · Activism

What does Gezi Park tell us about same-sex marriage?

Jeff Sparrow

The extraordinary protests currently underway in Turkey provide an opportunity to revisit a recent debate about the relationship between symbolic and real campaigns. The argument began with Helen Razer’s much-discussed Crikey piece entitled ‘The Left has lost its way through symbolism and stupidity’.

3 June 20137 June 2013 · Politics

‘What makes the green grass grow?’

Jeff Sparrow

Over the last few decades, the rightward shift in the political culture has facilitated a rehabilitation of the Vietnam War, a process that, in Australia, has accompanied and built upon the re-fashioning of Anzac Day, as the extrication of the Great War from any historical context whatsoever paves the way for a similar un-remembering of Vietnam.

31 May 20137 June 2013 · Activism

On the ‘we’re all racist’ deepity

Jeff Sparrow

‘Really, we’re all racist.’ The claim comes up in the wake of every public conversation about racism.

9 April 20132 June 2013 · Politics

On Margaret Thatcher

Jeff Sparrow

Here, richly, with ridiculous display, The Politician’s corpse was laid away. While all of his acquaintance sneered and slanged I wept: for I had longed to see him hanged.

Published in Overland Issue 210 Autumn 2013 ·

Editorial

Jeff Sparrow

We go to print almost exactly on the tenth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, a historic crime that perfectly illustrates Auden’s point, given the unctuous, oily rhetoric of that time cloaking all the war’s most grotesque atrocities in the vocabulary of humanitarianism.

22 March 20132 June 2013 · Politics

News from nowhere: on Labor’s leadership woes

Jeff Sparrow

Who was the Left candidate in Labor’s leadership clash yesterday? Who was the candidate of the Right? Such questions – the customary starting point for any political stoush – no longer even get raised in reference to the ALP.

4 March 2013 · Politics

Thoughts on the Gillard-Abbott election

Jeff Sparrow

On the centre-Left, a new election meme has been incubating, one that attributes Gillard’s persistent unpopularity to the hostility of the media, which has been either too shallow (the Monthly) or too sexist (Anne Summers) to appreciate her achievements.

26 February 20132 June 2013 · Politics

A response to Gerard Henderson

Jeff Sparrow

I’ve generally considered the amusement some leftists take from Gerard Henderson’s blog to be slightly distasteful, an echo of the nineteenth-century fashion for visiting London’s asylum to giggle at the Bedlamites as they grimaced and drooled and tugged at themselves.

11 January 2013 · Writing

Why don’t writers wear corpse paint?

Jeff Sparrow

Last year – and I no longer remember what prompted this – I became briefly obsessed with Norwegian black metal, especially the band Mayhem.

27 November 2012 · Main Posts

The threshold of another trembling world

Jeff Sparrow

‘I am standing on the threshold of another trembling world. May God have mercy on my soul.’ With that diary entry in 1981, IRA prisoner Bobby Sands launched his famous hunger strike in a British prison. But the words might equally have come from Omid Sorousheh, the Iranian asylum seeker, near death in Nauru after 45 days without food.

Published in Overland Issue 209 Summer 2012 · Writing

editorial

Jeff Sparrow

Overland is fundamentally committed to emerging writers. This edition features the winning entries from the Overland Victoria University Short Story Prize, the richest and most prestigious competition of its kind in Australia. They are introduced by Jennifer Mills, Overland’s incoming fiction editor, in a judge’s report offering a snapshot of the huge quantity of writing that was assessed.

18 October 201218 October 2012 · Activism

Beyond Twibbons: thinking about politics and social media

Jeff Sparrow

Today, even among the Australian’s core readership of aggrieved grandfathers, almost everyone gets online in some way, shape or form. The same study reveals that, as you would expect, a clear majority of internet users regularly access some form of social media), so much so that, in reality, far more people log into Facebook on a daily basis than subscribe to print newspapers, a comparison that should (but won’t) make the curmudgeon chorus shut its collective pie hole.

15 October 201216 October 2012 · Politics

Sexism and the Left

Jeff Sparrow

First, there’s the question of the address itself: a powerful riposte to a notorious sexist that went viral around the world, delivered by the leader of a government that was, at that very moment, cutting parenting payments to 90 000 single mothers by as much as $100 a week. How does one assess these simultaneous developments?

2 October 20122 October 2012 · Main Posts

Alan Jones, hate speech and discord

Jeff Sparrow

Alan Jones has, as the police say, form: a long record of sexist bullying and race-baiting, memorably on display during his attempt to incite a pogrom on the beach at Cronulla some years back.

19 September 201219 September 2012 · Main Posts

Protests and the hollowing of democracy

Jeff Sparrow

In the last year or so, a succession of pretty minor demonstrations (the tent embassy, the protests about the Islamophobic film, the CFMEU picket lines in Melbourne, the Occupy events) have all sparked moral panics out of all proportion to what actually occurred.

3 September 20123 September 2012 · Politics

Welcome to Australia

Jeff Sparrow

Here’s how the Australian government addresses you if you’re rich and have time on your hands. Here’s how it addresses you if you’re poor and desperate.

1 September 20121 September 2012 · Politics

Eastwooding: Dirty Harry and rightwing populism

Jeff Sparrow

In its own strange way, Clint Eastwood’s tense confrontation with a chair during the Republican convention illustrated the dynamics of the contemporary Right far better than anything much else at that event.

Published in Overland Issue 208 Spring 2012 ·

editorial

Jeff Sparrow

‘The British press is extremely centralised, and most of it is owned by wealthy men who have every motive to be dishonest on certain important topics.’ So writes George Orwell in the original preface to Animal Farm.

Published in Overland Issue 208 Spring 2012 ·

Issue 208

Jeff Sparrow

Contents Regulars Jeff Sparrow − Editorial Judy Horacek Alison Croggon Rjurik Davidson Features Jonathan Green The end of a world An elegy for the newspaper Alex Mitchell Fatal obsessions Murdoch’s early years Anwyn Crawford Fat, privilege and resistance A response to Jennifer Lee Matt Cornell Outsider porn Adult goes indie Juliana Qian The name and […]

16 August 201216 August 2012 · Reviews

After Zionism

Jeff Sparrow

In the media, particularly in Australia, the ‘two-state solution’ to the Palestine/Israel crisis – that is to say, the proposition that peace depends upon the creation of a new Palestinian state alongside Israel – serves as an identifier more than an actual idea. If you pay lip service to ‘two states’, you are a responsible, serious person. If you don’t, well, you aren’t.

6 August 201230 June 2016 · History

‘When the burning moment breaks’: gun control and rage massacres

Jeff Sparrow

On 23 January 1924, a man opened fire with a .44 repeating rifle on the families picnicking in Melbourne’s Botanical Gardens. He shot five people, seemingly targeted at random, before the gun failed. Three died. The murderer, later identified as Norman List, ran from the scene. On 2 February, his body was found in the bush in Pakenham, where he’d killed himself.

2 August 20122 August 2012 · Main Posts

Talking about sport

Jeff Sparrow

Given the centrality of sport to contemporary culture, the relative paucity of leftwing analysis of it has always seemed strange, particularly when contrasted to the attention given to other cultural forms. There’s a rich tradition of radical theory to draw upon when reading poetry or attending theatre; there’s much less available when discussing sport. Indeed, the Left often oscillates between simply dismissing sport as a distraction, and uncritically celebrating it as authentic plebian culture.

23 July 201224 July 2012 · Main Posts

Vale Alexander Cockburn

Jeff Sparrow

‘A revolutionary career,’ noted Max Horkheimer somewhere, ‘does not lead to banquets and honorary titles, interesting research and professorial wages. It leads to misery, disgrace, ingratitude, prison and a voyage into the unknown, illuminated by only an almost superhuman belief.’

9 July 20129 July 2012 · Main Posts

Melbourne from the Falls

Jeff Sparrow

Richard Holmes describes biography as a 'handshake across time', an 'act of human solidarity and in its own way an act of recognition and of love.' The RM books were motivated by a similar sentiment. Re-excavating the physical traces of labour history was, as we said in the introduction, an effort to 'provide a bridge between the struggles of the past and the people of the present'.

20 June 201220 June 2012 · Politics

A short history of Communist jazz

Jeff Sparrow

‘Since 1947, he has been intermittently associated with Communist-sponsored peace activities.’ That’s from an ASIO file compiled in the 1960s about the jazz pianist Graeme Bell, who died last week aged 97.

Published in Overland Issue 207 Winter 2012 ·

Editorial

Jeff Sparrow

After the huge vote for the neo-fascist National Front, the philosopher Alain Badiou excoriated the French intelligentsia for their complicity with the new anti-Muslim racism. ‘As always,’ he wrote, ‘the idea – no matter how criminal – precedes power, which in turn shapes the opinion that it needs. The intellectual – no matter how appalling – precedes the minister, who constructs her followers.’

Published in Overland Issue 207 Winter 2012 ·

Issue 207

Jeff Sparrow

Contents Regulars Jeff Sparrow − Editorial Judy Horacek Alison Croggon Rjurik Davidson Features Matthew Clayfield − Waiting on the Arriaga-Ixtepec The horrific ordeal of America’s immigrants Jennifer Lee − A big fat fight The case for fat activism Gail Dines & Sharon Smith − Porn and the misogyny emergency What should feminists prioritise? Jessica Whyte […]

1 June 20121 June 2012 · Main Posts

Schapelle and Ranjini

Jeff Sparrow

You can learn a lot from Schapelle Corby. Or, more particularly, from the coverage of the Corby saga. Since Corby’s arrest for drug smuggling, every development in her case has spurred a media blizzard. Most recently, of course, the prospect that she might receive an early parole became front page news everywhere. Or, at least, everywhere in Australia.

11 May 201214 May 2012 · Culture

Living in The Avengers’ universe

Jeff Sparrow

What happens when the disengagement of the populace from political life gets thoroughly normalised? In such circumstances, the political class and its agents seem, almost by definition, able to perform feats that ordinary people simply cannot. That seems to me the context for the new hegemony of superheroes. The genre no longer presents as wish-fulfillment so much as a kind of realism – an accurate depiction of the way society works. We are, in other words, already living in a comic book.

24 April 201226 April 2014 · Politics

Memory and the anti-politics of Anzac

Jeff Sparrow

Anzac Day celebrates forgetting. Its revival, the transformation of a ceremony nearly extinct in the 1980s into today’s turbocharged festival, coincides with the excision from national consciousness of the most important aspects of the Great War.

10 April 201210 April 2012 · Main Posts

From Freethought to New Atheism

Jeff Sparrow

I’ve written an article for Counterpunch, using some episodes from Melbourne’s radical history to make an argument about the politics of the New Atheism. It’s really a continuation of a Meanjin essay from a couple of years back.

4 April 2012 · Writing

The abolition of the Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards

Jeff Sparrow

The abolition of the Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards represents a harbinger of things to come. Not just in that state, though you’d have to say that Campell Newman’s decision to cut a major book award bang in the middle of the National Year of Reading does not bode well for arts funding in Australia's north.

5 March 201228 March 2012 · Main Posts

So it’s Carr(ion)

Jeff Sparrow

If you were asked to present an individual who personally embodied the general strategic orientation of modern Labor, Bob Carr would be a pretty good choice. Imre Salusinszky’s summed up Carr’s elevation in a piece for the Australian entitled ‘The hard Right man cometh’.

Published in Overland Issue 205 Summer 2011 · Main Posts

Editorial

Jeff Sparrow

Most of the articles in this edition of Overland were written before the Occupy Together movement began. The issue was finished as occupations spread to more than 80 countries and 1000 cities, in the biggest wave of international protest since the Iraq war. In Melbourne, where Overland’s based, Occupy demonstrators were violently dispersed in an extraordinary police operation. As we go to press, crackdowns are scheduled for other cities across the world.

Published in Overland Issue 205 Summer 2011 ·

Issue 205

Jeff Sparrow

summer 2011 ISBN 978-0-9871301-2-9 published 2 December 2011 Mattias Gardell on the Oslo massacre, the politics of Indigenous languages, an extract from Alexis Wright’s forthcoming novel and much more. Contents Regulars Jeff Sparrow − Editorial Alison Croggon Features Mattias Gardell − Terror in the Norwegian woods The rise of a anti-Muslim far Right in Europe […]

17 November 201126 March 2012 · Main Posts

The Hunger Games and rebellion

Jeff Sparrow

Here’s another small straw in the wind. This is the trailer for The Hunger Games movie. Even from that, you should get the gist. A country where the poor are tremendously poor and the rich are enormously rich, and where every so often young people are induced to fight and die in meaningless conflicts used […]

29 October 201126 March 2012 · Main Posts

Occupy Melbourne: the return

Jeff Sparrow

If it achieves nothing else, by locking out all its staff, Qantas has shown why the Occupy movement matters. Naturally, the usual performing seals will bark and clap their fins in the Murdoch press about how Alan Joyce had no option. He had to crush the union, you see – it’s that old Vietnam logic […]

15 October 201126 March 2012 · Main Posts

Occupy Melbourne: some initial thoughts

Jeff Sparrow

The Melbourne City Square was once a public space before the various private bars and hotels and restaurants that now dominate the area claimed it for their own. In that respect, it provided a fitting venue for Occupy Melbourne to reclaim. By my count, there were about a thousand people in the square today: a […]

5 September 201126 March 2012 · Main Posts

‘No nation can liberate another nation’

Jeff Sparrow

Malalai Joya’s talks at the Melbourne Writers’ Festival presented the war in Afghanistan quite differently to how it’s normally discussed here. Whereas Australians are told that, without NATO, Afghanistan would descend into civil war, Joya explained that civil war is already raging; where we’re assured that foreign intervention protects Afghans from the Taliban, Joya says […]

28 August 201127 March 2012 · Main Posts

Jay Rosen: ‘Don’t you think that’s a little strange?’

Jeff Sparrow

The text of Jay Rosen’s Big Idea presentation from the MWF is available in full. There’s lots to like in it: his instinctive revulsion at a TV program called Insiders on which journalists interview journalists, his dissection of the ‘cult of saviness’, his argument about the cult of innocence that plays out in ‘he said, […]

Published in Overland Issue 204 Spring 2011 · Main Posts

Editorial

Jeff Sparrow

It’s tempting to see the last decade as the confirmation of Coleridge’s quip about how a politics that begins in fear, ends in folly. God knows, since 9/11 there’s been folly enough. Costing the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan is not easy but a very conservative estimate suggests that the US has spent at least $900 billion.

Published in Overland Issue 204 Spring 2011 · Main Posts

Issue 204

Jeff Sparrow

Contents Regulars Jeff Sparrow − Editorial Anwyn Crawford Alison Croggon Rjurik Davidson Features Malalai Joya − Interview Get out of Afghanistan now! John Martinkus − ‘Kidnapped in Iraq, attacked in Australia’ Journalism in a time of war Eve Vincent− Life in limbo The cruelty of mandatory detention Jessica Whyte − ‘The long night of the […]

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14 June 20114 April 2013 · Main Posts

The Left, the Right and the New Atheism: a response to PZ Myers

Jeff Sparrow

Given the interest in my recent New Matilda article, I’d already planned to write more on the New Atheism. Now that PZ Myers, a speaker at the 2012 Melbourne conference, has replied to that piece, it seems appropriate to continue the discussion as a response to him. Myers provides the following summation of my critique […]

Published in Overland Issue 203 Winter 2011 · Main Posts

Issue 203

Jeff Sparrow

Contents Regulars Jeff Sparrow − Editorial Correspondence Anwyn Crawford Alison Croggon Essays Stephanie Holt − Football’s women problem Rodney Croome − ‘True and good citizens’ Benjamin Law − Only disconnect Phillip Deery − Remembering ASIO Antony Loewenstein − Boycotts and literary festivals Meanland: Fiona Wright − Readers’ feast Debate Michael Brull versus Tad Tietze − […]

Published in Overland Issue 203 Winter 2011 · Main Posts

Editorial

Jeff Sparrow

Women are not actually a minority group, nor is there a shortage, in the world, of female writers. So began the open letter to the New Yorker from subscriber Anne Hays, a letter that noted the remarkable under-representation of female writers in that journal.

30 May 201126 March 2012 · Main Posts

The great carbon hypocrisy

Jeff Sparrow

Hypocrisy is embedded in the DNA of the Liberal Party, particularly since the turn from patrician conservatism to a right-wing populism that, by its nature, upholds well-salaried blowhards as the ordained representatives of the common folk. In response to Barnaby Joyce’s attack upon Cate Blanchett as rich and out of touch, it’s easy to point […]

2 May 20111 June 2012 · Main Posts

Death of bin Laden

Jeff Sparrow

So Osama bin Laden has been killed. Ok. Now what? In the short term, an orgy of ghoulish US nationalism, as the media drools over the bloodied corpse, a body that, we’re told, the US now has in its possession, to be (no doubt) lovingly displayed at some future date. Bin Laden was a mass […]

29 April 20111 June 2012 · Main Posts

Bread and circuses, bread and roses

Jeff Sparrow

The royal family is an institutional codification of your worthlessness. No matter how you slice and dice it, an aristocracy, by definition, rests on the brute fact that they are royal and you are common, and that, therefore, their DNA entitles them to privileges and honours from which you will always and forever be excluded. […]

Published in Overland Issue 202 Autumn 2011 · Main Posts

Editorial

Jeff Sparrow

Today, injustice goes with a certain stride, The oppressors move in for ten thousand years. Force sounds certain: it will stay the way it is. No voice resounds except the voice of the rulers And on the markets, exploitation says it out loud: I am only just beginning. But of the oppressed, many now say: […]

Published in Overland Issue 202 Autumn 2011 · Main Posts

Issue 202

Jeff Sparrow

Contents Regulars Jeff Sparrow − Editorial Correspondence Alison Croggon Essays Guy Rundle − ‘Open-eyed conspiracy his time doth take’ Wendy Bacon − Being free by acting free Rjurik Davidson − Imagining new worlds Bob Gosford − ‘They took our culture — now there is no law’ Alexis Wright − Talking about tomorrow Patricia Gillespie − […]

15 March 20111 June 2012 · Main Posts

After a nuclear event

Jeff Sparrow

We don’t know yet how serious the nuclear crisis in Japan will be. With luck, the leaks will be contained soon. God knows, the Japanese people have suffered enough. But what’s happened so far highlights the fundamental problem with nuclear energy. The case against atomic power is – and has always been – very straightforward. […]

21 February 20111 June 2012 · Reviews

Decision Points: a review

Jeff Sparrow

George W Bush comes, he says, from ‘a family of bestselling authors’. His mother and father wrote books, as did his sister, his wife and his daughter. Even his parents’ dogs, C. Fred and Millie, ‘authored their own works’. Well, if Millie can do it, W can, too – and, one presumes, using much the […]

29 January 20111 June 2012 · Main Posts

Australia, anything to say to Mubarak?

Jeff Sparrow

On 11 December 2010, Australian foreign minister Kevin Rudd met with the Egyptian dictator Mubarak. At a press conference with his Egyptian counterpart, Rudd said: [C]ould I begin by again affirming the strength of this important bilateral relationship. A 60th anniversary celebration is important because it causes us to reflect on what we have done […]

11 January 201121 January 2013 · Main Posts

The social significance of the Arizona massacre

Jeff Sparrow

We are now seeing a concerted attempt to obscure and confuse the meaning of the terrorist act that took place in Tucson, Arizona. In the immediate aftermath of the shooting, many people expressed their revulsion at the violent rhetoric that’s become so much a part of contemporary conservatism, particularly in the US. Since then, however, […]

Published in Overland Issue 201 Summer 2010 · Main Posts

The banality of goodism

Jeff Sparrow

‘Colonisation,’ Césaire argued, ‘dehumanises even the most civilised man; … colonial activity, colonial enterprise, colonial conquest, which is based on contempt for the native and justified by that contempt, inevitably tends to change him who undertakes it; … the coloniser, who in order to ease his conscience gets into the habit of seeing the other man as an animal, accustoms himself to treating him like an animal, and tends objectively to transform himself into an animal.’

14 September 201016 September 2010 · Main Posts

Clive Hamilton in full effect

Jeff Sparrow

The excerpted Clive Hamilton essay on climate denialism at the ABC has now generated nearly 800 comments over at Drum, as well as spawning a reply from climate skeptics. You can now read Hamilton’s original essay from Overland 200 in full online. This might be a good time to mention that, until the end of […]

8 September 20108 September 2010 · Main Posts

The new order

Jeff Sparrow

It seems, then, that we have a government. What to make of the result? Andrew Robb recently wailed that a Labor-Green coalition would install ‘the most left wing government in Australia’s history’. Now, of course, that’s not, like, actually true or anything, but the rhetoric does highlight how remarkable this outcome actually is. Remember, a […]

6 September 20108 September 2010 · Main Posts

‘Telling whites what they want to hear’: Chris Graham on Noel Pearson

Jeff Sparrow

Noel Pearson gave a keynote address at the recent Melbourne Writers’ Festival. He also featured heavily in the election campaign, most often in the speeches of Tony Abbott. In his essay from Overland 200, Chris Graham casts a critical eye over Pearson’s politics. Whatever you think of Pearson’s politics, it almost certainly doesn’t match what […]

5 September 20105 September 2010 · Main Posts

200 launch party

Jeff Sparrow

Thanks to everyone who helped send edition 200 off into the world at the Melbourne Writers’ Festival. Lovely to see so many people, especially those from the online world. Don’t have any crowd shots, unfortunately, but here’s the three speakers. Onward and upward!

Published in Overland Issue Print Issue 200 Spring 2010 · Main Posts

Editorial

Jeff Sparrow

The edition has been a long time in the making. To put this anniversary in perspective, Overland was launched in 1954. The journal has thus outlasted Robert Menzies, apartheid, the Soviet Union, White Australia, penal powers, Gough Whitlam, the Bulletin, Joh Bjelke-Petersen, the Communist Party of Australia and John Howard.

Published in Overland Issue Print Issue 200 Spring 2010 · Main Posts

Issue 200

Jeff Sparrow

Contents Regulars Jeff Sparrow − Editorial Correspondence CAL—Art and Life: Bruce Mutard − Nine o’clock finish * Meanland: Jenny Lee − Publishers at the floodgates Essays Chris Graham − Telling whites what they want to hear Michelle Carmody − Beauty without borders Anwyn Crawford − Permanent daylight Jacinda Woodhead − Hip-hop in the Wild West […]

22 August 201023 August 2010 · Main Posts

Nasty but weak

Jeff Sparrow

Not exactly great news to wake up to but it’s not as bad as it might be. Sure, it’s more likely than not that Tony Abbott will be the new prime minister, and the prospect of a conservative government propped up by sinister bumpkins like Bob Katter is pretty grim. Certainly, when Abbott became leader, […]

16 August 201016 August 2010 · Main Posts

Radiothon on RRR: make contact

Jeff Sparrow

Radiothon 2010 has begun on Melbourne’s 3RRR FM. What’s that to do with Overland? Well, it’s partly that 3RRR supports writers and writing in a way that no other media does. On Aural Text, for instance, alicia has been promoting local gigs, independent publishing/publishers, zinesters and performers for more than a decade. In that sense […]

6 August 20107 August 2010 · Main Posts

Towards 200

Jeff Sparrow

Today, I’ve been putting away a full run of old Overlands. As we move to the launch of edition 200, it seemed like an idea to put up a few of the past covers that caught my eye. So here’s a bunch of them, selected on no basis other than I thought that they looked […]

26 July 201026 July 2010 · Main Posts

Wikileaks reveals what the leaders debate didn’t

Jeff Sparrow

In last night’s puppet show, the topic of Afghanistan emerged only briefly but sufficiently long for both candidates to pledge ongoing war until the ‘job is done’. Courtesy of Wikileaks, we now have a much greater idea of what exactly that job is. The whistleblower site has begun releasing a trove of new documents containing […]

18 July 201021 July 2010 · Main Posts

It begins

Jeff Sparrow

And so to an election on 21 August. It’s not an inspiring prospect: a contest between two candidates, each of whom could plausibly be described as the most conservative leader their respective parties have ever fielded. About Tony Abbott, nothing need really be said. He is precisely what he seems, an amalgam of John Howard […]

25 June 201030 June 2010 · Main Posts

The personal is political

Jeff Sparrow

The post below is a slightly different version of a piece currently on the ABC Drum site.Basically, I was writing something for Drum on the personalisation of politics when news of the spill broke out, and so I hastily tried to illustrate the argument in terms of the Rudd-Gillard contest. Because of the spill coverage, […]

4 June 20104 June 2010 · Main Posts

Friday music thread

Jeff Sparrow

Last night I saw the Malthouse’s production of Threepenny Opera, and I’ve been singing ‘Mack the Knife’ ever since. And that led me to this. Anyway, consider this an open music thread, particularly for music in film or theatre.

31 May 201021 January 2013 · Main Posts

Gaza flotilla massacre: a Sharpeville at sea [UPDATED]

Jeff Sparrow

More than ten people have been killed after Israeli forces attacked a flotilla bringing aid supplies to the besieged people of Gaza. Details are still sketchy – some sources claim twenty people are dead – but it seems that IDF commandoes stormed the vessels and then opened fire with live ammunition. The flotilla was part […]

31 May 201031 May 2010 · Main Posts

The price tag for the forever war

Jeff Sparrow

At the Emerging Writers’ Festival on Sunday, I mentioned that the US had spent 900 billion dollars on its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. As it happens, my information was out of date. Actually, the bill now stands at a round trillion dollars. Yep. A trillion. That’s a one and then twelve zeroes. To put […]

18 May 201021 January 2013 · Main Posts

Pathological anti-Islam

Jeff Sparrow

For the last few weeks, we’ve learned, over and over again, why the burqa must be banned. A visible face is, apparently, central to Western modernity (which is why, one imagines, that new-fangled device known as the telephone will never catch on). Besides, outlawing the burqa is a feminist cause – to preserve women’s right […]

13 May 2010 · Main Posts

Overland 198 online

Jeff Sparrow

We’ve finally got all the contents of Overland 198 online, including the poetry. And while we’re doing some self-promotion, there’s a whole bunch of Overland events coming up at the Wheeler Centre, the Sydney Writers Festival and the Emerging Writers Festival.

Published in Overland Issue Print Issue 198 Autumn 2010 ·

Correspondence

Jeff Sparrow

Thank heavens someone – and, what a delicious irony, a woman – should finally point out (Overland 197) that the Emperor (I know he would prefer King, but then I’ve seen him referred to as St Nick – the Devil, of course, rather than the man torturing reindeer at the North Pole) has no clothes.

Published in Overland Issue Print Issue 198 Autumn 2010 · Main Posts

Editorial

Jeff Sparrow

There seems to be a consensus forming in Australian publishing circles that 2010 will be the year when the e-book goes mainstream. That’s the context for the first essay in Overland’s ‘Meanland’ collaboration with Meanjin: Margaret Simons’ exploration of current and future reading practices.

9 April 201012 May 2010 · Main Posts

The rules of engagement

Jeff Sparrow

Much of the outrage around the 2007 helicopter attack in Iraq recorded in video revealed by Wikileaks has centred on whether or not the Apache crew committed a war crime. That’s, however, the wrong frame to understand what took place. What’s most significant about the killings is not the extent that they differ from standard […]

6 April 201012 May 2010 · Main Posts

This is what the war looks like

Jeff Sparrow

Wikileaks has just released this footage from a US Apache helicopter killing a group of civilians in Baghdad in 2007. The clip shows the crew strafing the men from the air and then returning to kill the occupants of a van attempting to collect the wounded. The dead included two journalists from Reuters. In the […]

1 April 201012 May 2010 · Main Posts

Overland extract: Michael Brull on Zionism

Jeff Sparrow

In Overland 198, Michael Brull replies to Ned Curthoys and Dennis Altman on how Australian Leftists should respond to Zionism: This is an intervention, of sorts, into the disagreements between the dissident Jews Ned Curthoys and Dennis Altman (see Overland 187, 196 and 197). Given the scarcity of those publicly distancing themselves in any way […]

Published in Overland Issue Print Issue 197 Summer 2009 · Main Posts

Issue 197

Jeff Sparrow

Contents Regulars Jeff Sparrow − Editorial Correspondence Towards 200: Fiona Capp − The Lost Garden CAL Art and Life: Darshana Jayemanne − The Resident of Evil Creek* Essays Guy Rundle − When the rubric hits the Rudd Anwyn Crawford − The monarch of middlebrow Lizzie O’Shea − Beautiful as the sunset Francesca Rendle-Short − My […]

Published in Overland Issue Print Issue 198 Autumn 2010 · Main Posts

Issue 198

Jeff Sparrow

Contents Regulars Jeff Sparrow − Editorial Correspondence Essays Mungo MacCallum − Rudd and the boat people Meanland: Margaret Simons − Reading in an age of change Towards 200: Raewyn Connell − Bread and waratahs Lizzie O’Shea − Letters from death row CAL—Art and life: Simon Sellars − Hiding in plain sight * Brian Walters − […]

26 February 20103 March 2010 · Main Posts

Of whales and men

Jeff Sparrow

The story of Tilikum the killer whale illustrates, in a rather horrible fashion, the weird contradictions in the way we relate to nature these days. For those who haven’t followed the case, Tilikum is a prize exhibit in Sea World, Florida. The day before yesterday, it was being patted by its trainer, one Dawn Brancheau, […]

18 February 201012 May 2010 · Main Posts

Neil James’ proposal to imprison me for treason; my response to the same

Jeff Sparrow

Yesterday, the following item appeared in the Crikey correspondence section: Neil James, Executive Director, Australia Defence Association, writes: Re. “War criminal to hero … a dangerous precedent” (Monday, item 19). Jeff Sparrow used a popular-front agitprop technique, redolent of the Communist Party of Australia in its 1930-1970 heyday period, in tacking on some incorrect claims […]

17 February 201012 May 2010 · Main Posts

Launch of Gil Scott Heron Is on Parole

Jeff Sparrow

That clip from the new Gil Scott Heron album is by way of reminder that Maxine Clarke’s launching her new book of poetry Gil Scott Heron Is on Parole at Readings, Carlton at 6.30 pm on 18 February. You can buy the book on the night or via Picaro Press. You might also want to […]

12 February 201012 May 2010 · Main Posts

‘Only one man in a large army’

Jeff Sparrow

It seems like just yesterday. Of course, in all the celebrations, no-one will raise the rather embarrassing fact that, throughout the Apartheid era, most Western governments entirely supported the racist regime’s assessment of the ANC leader as a dangerous criminal. Indeed, it was only in 2008 that the US removed Mandela from its terrorist watch […]

9 February 201012 May 2010 · Main Posts

The increasing weirdness of Melbourne’s ‘race debate’

Jeff Sparrow

Yesterday in Drum, I noted the extraordinary comments by the Australian’s foreign editor Greg Sheridan and the contrast they made with the reaction from both the Victorian and Federal ALP. Sheridan, a man usually only roused by the prospect of a fresh war, wrote in the Oz that ‘through the widely publicised assaults, murders and […]

5 February 20103 March 2010 · Main Posts

Again on the great blogging debate

Jeff Sparrow

Well, not really: just wanted to say that, following those discussions, we have amended what we’re asking in our search for new Overland bloggers. On the one hand, because we can’t pay them, we don’t expect them to contribute on a weekly basis. We’re happy for people to blog whenever they can. On the other, […]

5 February 20103 March 2010 · Main Posts

Scattered thoughts on print and literary journals

Jeff Sparrow

For obvious reasons, this is a topic of some import here at Overland, as well as everywhere else around the world. The recent Ted Genoways article in Mother Jones has generated considerable discussion; now, the book blog at the LA Times has weighed in. I’ve just come back from an Australia Council meeting about literary […]

1 February 201015 February 2010 · Main Posts

Meanland event nearly sold out

Jeff Sparrow

If you’re planning to come to the first ‘Meanland’ event — the panel discussion featuring Sherman Young, Margaret Simons, Peter Craven and Marieke Hardy — you’d better get your skates on because it’s nearly booked out. Note, too, the Overland lecture with Mungo MacCalllum is also selling briskly. Both Mungo MacCallum and Margaret Simons will […]

29 January 201012 May 2010 · Main Posts

Vale Alistair Hulett

Jeff Sparrow

David Rovics writes: Today is my daughter Leila’s fourth birthday, and while this occasion brings my thoughts back to the day she was born, the past 24 hours have otherwise been full of fairly devastating news. If the left can admit to having icons, then two of them have just died. Yesterday it was the […]

29 January 201012 May 2010 · Main Posts

‘we found ourselves tied up in a room containing a number of weapons and men in leather gimp masks’

Jeff Sparrow

My old email address has pretty much sunk under the weight of the spam it attracts and so, of necessity, I’ve become something of a connoisseur of the 419 letter, the literary genre of our time. What’s really interesting about email spam is how it usually accords to a strict moral economy. On the one […]

28 January 201012 May 2010 · Main Posts

‘a precious gift’

Jeff Sparrow

22 January 201022 January 2010 · Main Posts

blogging, payment, the ABC and Overland

Jeff Sparrow

As luck would have it, we’ve sent out a call for people to blog at Overland just as a controversy has developed over the ABC Book Show doing more-or-less the same thing. The arts industry’s reliance upon free labour is a fraught issue; what follows is an attempt to think the implications of what we’re […]

19 January 201012 May 2010 · Main Posts

‘we don’t need soldiers … there’s no war here’

Jeff Sparrow

That’s from al Jazeera; here’s the Guardian‘s account: The US military’s takeover of emergency operations in Haiti has triggered a diplomatic row with countries and aid agencies furious at having flights redirected. Brazil and France lodged an official protest with Washington after US military aircraft were given priority at Port-au-Prince’s congested airport, forcing many non-US […]

16 January 201012 May 2010 · Main Posts

the politics of misery

Jeff Sparrow

The American evangelist Pat Robertson’s claim that the Haitian earthquake resulted from a pact with the Devil have been widely reported. Interestingly, the ‘Satanic Haitians’ theory seems to be historical survival of the hysteria that the great Haitian slave rebellions instilled in white racists. Scott Mclemee explains (quoting CLR James’ mighty book The Black Jacobins) the […]

13 January 201012 May 2010 · Main Posts

ASIO, not the government, calling the shots on refugees

Jeff Sparrow

I’ve got a piece up at Crikey about ASIO’s determination about the Tamil refugees. Given it seems to be outside the paywall, I thought I’d post a link here.

10 January 201012 May 2010 · Main Posts

the future of online journalism

Jeff Sparrow

The web is, don’t you know, going to save that endangered species, the newspaper. At least, that’s the theory — and, of course, the model that everyone’s looking to is the Huffington Post, Ariana Huffington’s phenomenally successful bloggy-papery thing. Almost all the commercial online publications in Australia look increasingly Huffington-like: have a glance, for instance, […]

4 January 201012 May 2010 · Main Posts

on the murder of Nitin Garg

Jeff Sparrow

So another young Indian man has been killed in Melbourne. Once again, the newspapers report an immediate denial that racism played any role in the murder, though all the police statement actually says is that investigators have no information as to what took place. Furthermore, as Gautam Gupta from the Federation of Indian Students in […]

26 December 200912 May 2010 · Main Posts

video of US military trainers at work in Iraq

Jeff Sparrow

The mentality of modern day colonialism, captured in a five minute Youtube clip.

25 December 200912 May 2010 · Main Posts

musical interlude

Jeff Sparrow

21 December 200912 May 2010 · Main Posts

parable of the old man and the young

Jeff Sparrow

I’ve got a piece up at Drum comparing the Copenhagen fiasco with the way Europe blundered into the Great War in 1914. It was partly spurred by that Pew report which found that people over 65 were far more likely to deny that the earth was warming, that humanity was responsible and that this was, […]

18 December 200912 May 2010 · Main Posts

BBC debates executing gays

Jeff Sparrow

The Guardian reports that the BBC news website has been running a debate on the charming topic ‘Should homosexuals face execution?’ on a talkboard discussion for a World Service programme for African listeners. This is in the context of the new Ugandan legislation that makes homosexuality a capital crime. There’s an interesting story about the […]

17 December 200917 December 2009 · Main Posts

Subscriberthon prize announcement – the first of many…

Jeff Sparrow

The first prize we would like to announce was not one that we flagged during the event. It was not donated by any of our sponsors, and we’re not sure it’s worth anything like dollars. It’s a selection of 12 issues of Overland starting with Number Eight Spring 1956, through to our fiftieth anniversary edition […]

15 December 200912 May 2010 · Main Posts

they reform nothing; they seek to control everything

Jeff Sparrow

In Guy Rundle’s essay in Overland 197, he describes the evolution of modern Labor: The party no longer seeks to take control of objects (the products of the economy) for the benefit of subjects (the working class and the Australian people in general) but instead seeks to control subjects (especially the sub-groups and cultures that […]

14 December 200912 May 2010 · Main Posts

banging away at The Drum

Jeff Sparrow

I’ve got a piece up on the new ABC blog The Drum. It begins like this: Tony Blair’s latest admission on Iraq raises, yet again, the need for a genuine inquiry here in Australia about that misbegotten war. Even before Britain’s Chilcot inquiry has concluded, it has spurred a fresh round of revelations. Britain, we […]

11 December 200912 May 2010 · Main Posts

Avatar an anti-war film?

Jeff Sparrow

Who knew? The much-hyped James Cameron movie Avatar apparently has an anti-war theme. The fusillade of gas, incendiary bombs and guided missiles that wreck [the aliens’] ancient habitat is described as “shock and awe”, the term popularised by the US military assault on Baghdad that opened the Iraq war in 2003. The humans’ military commander […]

Published in Overland Issue Print Issue 197 Summer 2009 ·

Correspondence

Jeff Sparrow

Dennis Altman’s ‘Escaping the Tribe?’ (Overland 196) is a thoughtful attempt to mediate what he takes to be some of the more intransigent ideological positions on both sides of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. I wish, however, to criticise Altman’s concluding proposition

10 December 2009 · Main Posts

‘I assure you, demons take it quite seriously’

Jeff Sparrow

Via Andrew Sullivan, here’s an ab fab warning about the Satanic threat posed by Pokemon. The best moment comes at about 1.43, when our speaker wails: ‘Your children need to know that there’s a Devil and he hates them and he wants to ruin their life.’ At that point, the screen displays a cute pink […]

9 December 20099 December 2009 · Main Posts

so that was the subscriberthon that was

Jeff Sparrow

The inaugural Overland subscriberthon has now come and gone. After a somewhat shaky start, it proved a remarkable success, showcasing the snazzy new site and pulling in the subs. Thanks to everyone who subscribed or renewed; thanks, too, to all the sponsors, the bloggers, the commenters and everyone here at Overland HQ. Prizes will be […]

8 December 20099 December 2009 · Main Posts

Subscriberthon guest post: Mark Bahnisch on the era of magical thinking

Jeff Sparrow

Mark Bahnisch is the person (or at least one of them) behind Larvatus Prodeo, the biggest and most lively Left-leaning blog in Australia. Here he contributes a guest post on Australia’s years of magical thinking. Politics, under the sign of postmodernity, increasingly resembles an ethereal realm, floating free of any grounding. It’s become almost trite […]

8 December 20098 December 2009 · Main Posts

if Π.O. said to jump off a bridge, would you do it?

Jeff Sparrow

As Subscriberthon shudders to a close, it’s time to bring out a selection of Overland‘s nearest and dearest – including a cavalcade of former editors – urging you to dig deep in support of Australia’s only progressive literary journal. There’s still time to do the right thing. As the space for independent media contracts and […]

Published in Overland Issue Print Issue 197 Summer 2009 · Main Posts

Editorial

Jeff Sparrow

The Productivity Commission's report on parallel importation gave literary Australia a jolt that was no less unpleasant for being, in some ways, necessary.

8 December 2009 · Main Posts

Subscriberthon guest post: Guy Rundle on Ruddism and the progressive patriots

Jeff Sparrow

Guy Rundle is one of the most versatile writers in Australia. He provides daily commentary for Crikey, has long been associated with the political tendency around Arena and has just finished the forthcoming Max Gillies’ show Godzone. He’s also written the lead essay for Overland 197, a comparison of Ruddism and British New Labour, in […]

8 December 20098 December 2009 · Main Posts

Am I committing murder with this writing?

Jeff Sparrow

Here’s Francesca Rendle-Short’s extraordinary essay about her relationship with her fundamentalist father, a deceptively simply and very moving piece of prose. It should be read alongside Francesca’s earlier essay about her mother, morals campaigner Angel Rendle-Short.

4 December 2009 · Main Posts

Subscriberthon guest post: Antony Loewenstein on the state of the peace process

Jeff Sparrow

Antony Loewenstein is a prominent blogger, and the author of the oft-reprinted My Israel Question and the more recent Blogging Revolution. He also delivered, not so long ago, an Overland lecture on oil and the Middle East. Here, offers a provocative guest post on the state of the peace process under Rudd and Obama. There […]

4 December 20094 December 2009 · Main Posts

Nick Cave, Overland and sociology 101: a response to Anwyn Crawford

Jeff Sparrow

The piece below came via email. It was intended for the journal’s correspondence section but, given the online discussion sparked by the Crawford essay, it seems more appropriate to reproduce it (with the permission of its author) here. What is going on? Is this Overland – a substantial contributor to Australia’s otherwise anodyne literary culture, […]

3 December 20093 December 2009 · Main Posts

Subscriberthon guest post: Angela Meyer on perfect matches

Jeff Sparrow

Angela Meyer will be known to Overland readers from Crikey‘s Literary Minded blog. She is a writer herself, and is currently editing Bookseller and Publisher magazine. Here, she contributes a Subscriberthon guest post on the perils and pleasures of matching writers with readers. I’ve been savouring Richard Yates’ Collected Stories for about the past month […]

3 December 20094 December 2009 · Main Posts

Subscriberthon guest post: Sophie Cunningham on lost children, literary hauntings and Melbourne’s underground

Jeff Sparrow

Sophie Cunninghan is the editor of Meanjin and the author of the novels Geography and Bird. In Overland 197, she contributes a photo essay about following Melbourne’s Cave Clan into the drains below the city. You can read that piece here. She’s also written a special post to encourage potential subscribers. Remember, you can subscribe […]

3 December 200916 September 2010 · Main Posts

Overland, Judith Wright, Fiona Capp and emerging writers

Jeff Sparrow

This is the third year that, with the help of the Malcolm Robertson Foundation, Overland has hosted the Judith Wright Poetry Prize for New and Emerging Poets, a competition that is closing very, very soon. Like many poets, Wright had a long and fruitful association with Overland, the journal in which her last published poem, […]

2 December 20092 December 2009 · Main Posts

never mind the bollocks, here’s Subscriberthon

Jeff Sparrow

James Bradley (the man behind the City of Tongues blog and many fine novels, most recently The Resurrectionist), writing for Australian Literary Review: Overland founder Stephen Murray-Smith ended the magazine’s association with the Communist Party in 1958, but it remains the most overtly political of the Australian literary magazines […] Perhaps ironically, the result is […]

2 December 20092 December 2009 · Main Posts

everyone’s a winner to us!

Jeff Sparrow

Subs have been rolling in all morning. But we have sufficient prizes that your chances of winning something are very, very good. So subscribe now — and, with luck, karma will manifest itself instantly in the form of a prize. (Note: prizes may not actually contain karma.)

2 December 20092 December 2009 · Main Posts

Nick Cave and the mainstreaming of sexism

Jeff Sparrow

One of the reasons you should be subscribing during Subscriberthon is Anwyn Crawford’s article on Nick Cave in issue 197. As she points out, throughout 2009 Nick Cave was everywhere. Cave now occupies a curious position in Australian culture. Rather than the Black Crow King of his own imagination, he’s more the Monarch of Middlebrow. […]

1 December 20091 December 2009 · Main Posts

Welcome to Subscriberthon 2009

Jeff Sparrow

Welcome to our new website – and welcome to the Overland Subscriberthon 2009.Between now and 8 December, we’ll be calling on anyone and everyone in the orbit of Overland to make a small contribution to the journal’s ongoing health. In this era of digital databases, most people can, with a little ingenuity, access most publications […]

30 November 200930 November 2009 · Main Posts

our cup overfloweth

Jeff Sparrow

Thanks to everyone who braved the elements for the Overland–Meanjin end of year function and bowling contest. We are pleased to report that the emu egg cup has now been reclaimed by its rightful owners.

30 November 2009 · Main Posts

talk on killing

Jeff Sparrow

Courtesy Anthony Snowden and the good folk at Engage media, here’s a little vid of me talking with Seb Prowse at New International Books about my book Killing.

27 November 2009 · Main Posts

a joint communique from somewhere in Meanland

Jeff Sparrow

On Sunday Meanjin and Overland will share a launch of their December issues, and a Christmas party (though only one of us will get to keep the emu egg cup). Our collaboration will continue throughout 2010 with a project called ‘Reading in an Age of Change’ (or Meanland). This joint project aims to create a […]

26 November 2009 · Main Posts

happenings aplenty

Jeff Sparrow

How many ways can you absorb Overland goodness? Why, let’s count them! 1. If you are a subscriber, you would have received (or be just about to receive) Overland 197, with Guy Rundle on Kevin Rudd, Fiona Capp on Judith Wright, Anwyn Crawford on Nick Cave, Sophie Cunningham on the world beneath Melbourne and much, […]

Published in Overland Issue Print Issue 196 Spring 2009 · Main Posts

Issue 196

Jeff Sparrow

Contents Jeff Sparrow − Editorial Features Christos Tsiolkas − The Slap 1.0 Maxine Clarke−The unbearable whiteness of beauty Rodney Hall−Copyright, the market and the survival of Aust Lit Dennis Altman−Escaping the tribe? Bob Brown−The will of the people Jenny Hocking−The election that never was Carmela Baranowska−‘Why are you still alive?’ Thomas Shepherd−A life in […]

25 November 2009 · Main Posts

why whites have a material stake in Aboriginal rights, part two

Jeff Sparrow

Last week, I wrote a piece for New Matilda comparing the Right-wing outrage over the apology to the (black) Stolen Generation with the almost universal acclaim for the apology to the (white) Forgotten Australians. The article concluded like this: But there’s another point to be made about the apology to the Forgotten Australians, and it’s […]

24 November 200924 November 2009 · Main Posts

how to bowl

Jeff Sparrow

Via the Meanjin gang, a handy instructional vid for anyone attending Sunday’s celebrations (that means all of you).

23 November 200923 November 2009 · Main Posts

the legacy of communism

Jeff Sparrow

In Tom O’Lincoln’s (recently republished) Into the Mainstream: The Decline of Australian Communism, he quotes, at one point, from an interview with party stalwart Vic Williams, discussing the CPA’s work in the fifties: It didn’t matter what happened, if some school committee hit the headlines, you could bet your life, there’d be some Communist Party […]

19 November 2009 · Main Posts

congratulations to Jessica Au

Jeff Sparrow

Jess Au from Meanjin‘s signed a contract for her debut novel. If you want a sense of why that’s exciting, try reading this.

17 November 200917 November 2009 · Main Posts

talkback on creative writing

Jeff Sparrow

Tomorrow on Aural Text (Wednesdays on 3RRR between 12 and 2), Alicia Sometimes and I will be interviewing the NZ hip hop artiste Tourettes, discussing madness and memoir with Sandy Jeffs and hearing Maxine Clarke’s review of the local poetry scene. But we’ll also be talking with RMIT’s Francesca Rendle-Short about how the creative writing […]

13 November 2009 · Main Posts

where now for books in Australia?

Jeff Sparrow

Two cheers for the decision to reject the Productivity Commission’s proposed changes to the publishing industry: one because the reforms would have made life harder for writers and the second because the government’s response suggests that there’s still a deep suspicion amongst the public about free market reforms. Beyond that, however, it’s hard to get […]

10 November 2009 · Main Posts

do not adjust your set

Jeff Sparrow

I don’t think I’ve mentioned it here but throughout November and December, I’m moonlighting as co-host with Alicia Sometimes on 3RRR’s Aural Text show, between 12 and 2 pm on Wednesdays. This week, we’re talking with Delia Falconer about the state of the short story, Sophie Cunningham about conferences and awards and the crew from […]

6 November 20096 November 2009 · Main Posts

Australian Fabians Young Writers Competition – win a trip to London and an internship at Demos!

Jeff Sparrow

Overland readers might be interested in the opportunity below: ** Write an opinion piece ** ** Get published in The Australian ** ** Spend a month with the UK’s leading think tank ** What are the most important issues facing Australia today? What practical policy solutions do you have to address those problems? Can you […]

4 November 2009 · Main Posts

capitalism: a love story

Jeff Sparrow

I reviewed the new Michael Moore film for Crikey. Strangely, Chris Berg from the IPA saw things rather differently. Anyway, the really important point is that I didn’t say anything about Moore’s title.

4 November 2009 · Main Posts

last days of the Eastern Market

Jeff Sparrow

My friend David Hudson sent me a link to a State Library of Victoria exhibition on the work of Eric Thake, someone whom I must confess I knew nothing whatsoever about. But have a look at his beautiful photos of the old Eastern Market, a central part of Old Melbourne that, like so much else, […]

29 October 200929 October 2009 · Main Posts

creativity and commodification

Jeff Sparrow

This appeared as a blog comment but seemed important enough to have its own thread. It’s from Malcolm King: I’m interested in comments from Overland readers about my article in the Australian on creativity and the commodification of academic programs. I was really targetting those unis who use the creative industries model. The creative industries […]

24 October 2009 · Main Posts

what Nick Griffin meant to say

Jeff Sparrow

23 October 2009 · Main Posts

Rundle responds

Jeff Sparrow

This is less a point-by-point reply to Jeff’s posting below, than it is a companion piece – the debate moved to this venue principally to argue it out at more length, and not test Crikey readers’ patience. But it also gives an opportunity to talk more explicitly about left strategy in an issue that has […]

22 October 2009 · Main Posts

Ruddism and refugees: a debate

Jeff Sparrow

Over the last few days, Guy Rundle and I have had something of a debate in Crikey over how Kevin Rudd’s attitude to refugees might develop (Guy’s first piece is here, my reply is here and Guy’s response here). Yesterday, Guy politely suggested that we take it outside, as they say, with some back and […]

17 October 2009 · Main Posts

Glen Beck and ‘Hey Hey’

Jeff Sparrow

Glen Beck presents such a freak show that it’s easy to underestimate him. But he’s important not simply because of his huge influence (the cable show and radio appearances attract millions and the book’s an instant bestseller) but because he successfully distills right-wing populism into its basic components, as this clip illustrates. Most obviously, the […]

15 October 200915 October 2009 · Main Posts

Rundle on Ruddock

Jeff Sparrow

In Crikey: There was the old demeanour — the skin like wet paper mache, waiting to be molded, the hair like a wreath of cigarette smoke. Ruddock, a man of liberal instincts some years, decades, ago, took on the refugee thing for complicated reasons. It chewed him up, and spat him out, and the result, pulsating with […]

14 October 2009 · Main Posts

all honorable men

Jeff Sparrow

Sometimes, you almost find yourself wishing for the utter collapse of Western civilisation, if only because it might mean that Philip Ruddock and others of his ilk might have themselves to seek asylum. Here’s the old vampire in the Oz this morning. The government then argues that the worldwide security situation has deteriorated. This is […]

13 October 2009 · Main Posts

blessed is the colt peacemaker

Jeff Sparrow

Yesterday, in an article for Crikey, I commented on (what seemed to me) an astonishing suggestion in Time magazine that the Nobel Peace Prize should have been awarded to nuclear weapons. Let me repeat. A. Peace. Prize. For. Nuclear. Fucking. Weapons. Today, I discover in the New York Times that Thomas Friedman thinks that the […]

9 October 20099 October 2009 · Main Posts

all just fun

Jeff Sparrow

The reaction to the ‘Hey Hey’ minstrel show is proving more revelatory than the actual skit. The original ‘Hey Hey’ always depended upon a certain low level bigotry, with jokes about Kamahl’s ethnicity interspersed with innuendo about Molly Meldrum’s sexuality. In that sense, the Jackson Jive performance was more exemplary than accidental: it was a […]

7 October 2009 · Main Posts

enter the vook

Jeff Sparrow

This, from a Salon article about ‘video books’, sounds about right: And so the familiar games begin. Someone is called upon to say that the sky is falling and to scold book publishers for being behind the times: “You can’t just be linear anymore with your text,” said Judith Carr, Atria’s publisher. Then someone stuffier […]

1 October 20091 October 2009 · Main Posts

Reviewing in an age of change

Jeff Sparrow

Another cheery story about the emerging literary landscape. Columbia English professor James Shapiro’s undergraduate seminar, “The Book Review,” which teaches skills necessary for students to make it as freelance literary critics, is on indefinite hiatus. “There are intellectual reasons to teach the course again,” Professor Shapiro wrote in an email, when the Transom asked if […]

28 September 200929 September 2009 · Main Posts

the future of Left publications

Jeff Sparrow

[Update:’Who’d want to got to a function with a whole bunch of of dykes, poofters, drunks and commos … ‘] As flies herald an arriving dump truck, so a rash of ‘youse are all poofters’ comments signals an incoming Tim Blair link. Truly, he must be proud. It’s a fine movement contemporary conservatism is building!] […]

28 September 2009 · Main Posts

‘uni made me dumb’: guest post by Koraly Dimitriadis

Jeff Sparrow

Koraly Dimitriadis is a Melbourne writer. She was one of the people who took part in the Overland master class on political writing, some time back. This is a repost from her blog. Before I started university, years and years ago, I would read a book a week. I would let my imagination lead me […]

27 September 200927 September 2009 · Main Posts

‘it’s the other one who’s the lunatic’

Jeff Sparrow

I posted this Nabokov-Trilling conversation some months back, marveling at how TV in the fifties could screen two stout old buffers talking learnedly about literature, in a way unthinkable today unless they were somehow locked into the Big Brother house. Anyway, the NYT links to the same clip and points out something that’s missed: Vlad’s […]

25 September 200925 September 2009 · Main Posts

fake fakers

Jeff Sparrow

With one of my email addresses slowly sinking under a tide of scam emails, I’ve come to appreciate the literary possibilities of the form. So it was nice to read, via Boing Boing, The Hobbit rendered as a 419 letter: Dear MR BAGGINS, Fellow Conspirator, I am Thorin Oakenshield, descendant of Thrain the Old and […]

24 September 2009 · Main Posts

Some Israel Questions

Jeff Sparrow

Apologies for light blogging. We’re a little overwhelmed by work at the moment, and so most of our time is spent rushing from one breach in the dam wall to the other, frantically plugging the leaks with our fingers. But I thought I should mention that I’m hosting a conversation with Antony Loewenstein about the […]

22 September 200922 September 2009 · Main Posts

archaeological traces of another world

Jeff Sparrow

I stumbled upon this on the back of a door at Victoria University the other day, one of the original stickers from the S11 blockade of the World Economic Forum back in 2000. With all that’s happened in the last nine years, the S11 protest seems, in retrospect, entirely fantastical. Not just the huge numbers […]

21 September 2009 · Main Posts

winning at scrabble against people who are much better than you

Jeff Sparrow

It’s good to know that there are people out there as desperately, pathetically competitive as I am. Who knew that you could get a huge crowd of people hooting with enthusiasm over ways to cheat at parlour games?

18 September 200925 September 2009 · Main Posts

Joint Vogel winners

Jeff Sparrow

This year, the Vogel Prize — the big award for novelists under thirty-five — was shared between two writers. Melbourne writer Lisa Lang and Sydney writer Kristel Thornell will share the $20,000 prize for their novels Utopian Man and Night Street. Ms Lang says she is looking forward to meeting her co-winner, who is currently […]

17 September 2009 · Main Posts

‘the new fascism hates Muslims’

Jeff Sparrow

I’ve got a piece up at New Matilda at the moment. It begins like this: If these aren’t fascists, they’re close enough as to make no difference. Last week, a shaven-headed gang calling itself the “English Defence League” staged an anti-Muslim rally in Birmingham. On Youtube, EDL supporters had boasted of belonging to “the most […]

16 September 2009 · Main Posts

the colon: its role in recent literary history

Jeff Sparrow

No, it’s not a post about literary excretions (oh, wait — perhaps it is). Your Monkey Called has a nice post that highlights, among other things, ubiquity of subtitles in contemporary non-fiction. Say, for instance, you wrote a book on killing — well, the actual title is gonna be something like Killing: Misadventures in Violence. […]

16 September 200916 September 2009 · Main Posts

and normal service is returned

Jeff Sparrow

As Maxine says, the Overload/Overland blog project has now come to an end. Thanks again to everyone involved. Special thanks to Maxine herself, for agitating to make it happen, for serving as a one-woman content provider, and for establishing a new visual and poetic aesthetic for the OL website. I’ve been thinking a lot about […]

28 August 200928 August 2009 · Main Posts

Paradise Anthology

Jeff Sparrow

Before the full catastrophe that is the Overload/Overland collaboration gets underway, people might be interested in the call for submissions from Michael Crane, the poet behind the Paradise Anthology. He writes: The Paradise Anthology is seeking short stories 2500 word maximum for their next issue to be released in February as part of the St […]

26 August 2009 · Main Posts

content: we haz it

Jeff Sparrow

A bunch of the non-fiction from the new edition of Overland is now online.

26 August 2009 · Main Posts

the masters’ apprentices

Jeff Sparrow

In his memoirs, the Labor Leader Arthur Calwell recalls visiting a patient in a hospital in Fitzroy: When I had left my friend’s room, a sweet smiling nun entered and he told her that he had just had a distinguished visitor. He named me as the visitor. The nun continued to smile sweetly and uttered […]

25 August 2009 · Main Posts

Overland undercover in the Oz (and elsewhere)

Jeff Sparrow

Yesterday the Australian ran an interesting story about independent filmmaker Carmela Baranowska, who won a Walkley for her documentary Taliban Country. The Oz‘s feature begins: FIVE years later people no longer stop me in the street and ask: “What happened? Did the Taliban kidnap you? Why are you still alive?” In the beginning, the plan […]

Published in Overland Issue Print Issue 196 Spring 2009 · Main Posts

editorial | Jeff Sparrow

Jeff Sparrow

OVERLAND 196 spring 2009 ISBN 978-0-9805346-3-4 published 22 August 2009 With the support of the City of Melbourne’s ‘Writing About Melbourne’ program, Overland approached four authors whose work we admired and invited them to contribute stories set in the city’s future. There were no other stipulations. You can see the results on pages 49−80, strikingly […]

20 August 2009 · Main Posts

Tackhead in the area

Jeff Sparrow

I’d forgotten how much I liked this band.

19 August 200919 August 2009 · Main Posts

Overland on Late Night Live on Thursday

Jeff Sparrow

Overland 196 features an interview with Thomas Shepherd, a man who spent two decades as an undercover informer inside the Communist Party of Australia and the Socialist Workers Party in the 1970s. This Thursday, he talks with Phillip Adams on Late Night Live about living a double life and its consequences. The new issue of […]

19 August 200919 August 2009 · Main Posts

second thoughts about District 9

Jeff Sparrow

I wanted to come back to this after reading a slew of negative reviews, attacking the film from the Left. For instance, in the New York Press: District 9’s South Africa–set story makes trash of that country’s Apartheid history by constructing a ludicrous allegory for segregation that involves human beings (South Africa’s white government, scientific […]

18 August 2009 · Main Posts

more on the future of litblogging

Jeff Sparrow

With more and more book reviews and commentary migrating online, we need to be conscious of what we’re gaining and what we’re losing. This is harder than it seems, since the gains and losses are often deeply entwined. For instance, one of the most liberating aspects of blogging is the release from the strictures of […]

16 August 200916 August 2009 · Main Posts

workers of the galaxy unite!

Jeff Sparrow

District 9 portrays first contact between humanity and an alien species taking place in post-apartheid South Africa, with the intergalactic visitors eventually herded into a gigantic slum. The film lurches unevenly between mockumentary and thriller, with the former much more successful than the latter. In some ways, the original short version, Alive in Joberg (embedded […]

14 August 2009 · Main Posts

an ABC newspaper?

Jeff Sparrow

My article calling for a publicly funded newspaper (an argument I’ve rehearsed here before) is now up at New Matilda.

13 August 2009 · Main Posts

from the twilight zone of Australia’s terrorism debate

Jeff Sparrow

Headline in Australian today: ‘Rudd moves to soften terrorism laws’. Headline in Age today: ‘Labor moves to toughen up terror laws.’ In reality, of course, the changes make Australia’s already extraordinary laws even more draconian, so much so that Labor’s actually being attacked on libertarian grounds by the Liberals. For instance, the changes would allow […]

11 August 200911 August 2009 · Main Posts

the internet is to readers what asbestos is to builders

Jeff Sparrow

OK, it’s anecdotal. Still, I’ve had the same conversation about five times in the last few weeks, with people remarking on how difficult they’re suddenly finding it to read a novel without distraction. I noted it last night. I sat down with a book I’d been meaning to read for months only to lose focus […]

9 August 2009 · Main Posts

‘only two things are infinite …

Jeff Sparrow

… the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former.’

7 August 2009 · Main Posts

litblogging and the future of reviewing

Jeff Sparrow

Book reviews — or, more generally, books pages — are disappearing from the newspapers. The process is more advanced in the US; here, if you want a vision of the future, take note of the increasing anorexia of the Saturday Age. Yes, the Oz has ALR as well as its own reviews but it’s hard […]

6 August 2009 · Main Posts

enough about you, let’s talk about us

Jeff Sparrow

Lou Swinn and Zoe Dattner have now added an internet book show to their growing empire. Here you can watch the dynamic duo discussing Kalinda’s book The Danger Game and my book Killing. There’s also a review of Kalinda in the latest Australian Literary Review (though it doesn’t seem to be online yet) and in […]

4 August 20094 August 2009 · Main Posts

the derangement continues

Jeff Sparrow

The birthers — that weird rightwing subculture mobilising around a conviction that Barack Obama is not a real Murcan but was instead hatched from an egg in Islamofascistan — have been atwitter about a Kenyan birth certificate unearthed by World Net Daily (the conservative site that employs Chuck Norris as a political commentator). Naturally, it’s […]

3 August 2009 · Main Posts

radio in Melbourne and radio in Sydney

Jeff Sparrow

The vile antics of Kyle and Jackie O raise the question: is there a difference in the culture of radio in Sydney compared to elsewhere in Australia? As far as I know, there’s no-one comparable to that horrid pair on Melbourne FM radio. There also seems to be a difference in the talk hosts. Melbourne […]

2 August 2009 · Main Posts

film posters and tableau vivant

Jeff Sparrow

Recently, I was reading an account of the Lindsays, the great artistic and literary dynasty. It showed photos of them at their family home performing tableaus. The tableau — or, more strictly, the ‘tableau vivant’ — was a popular nineteenth century entertainment, in which actors dressed up as historical or mythological costume and then arranged […]

31 July 2009 · Main Posts

save us from socialised medicine

Jeff Sparrow

Among its other magical qualities, the free market eliminates the need for travel — you can find world class deprivation in the midst of the richest society the world has ever known. Via Balloon Juice, we learn of a US scheme called the Remote Area Medical program. It was originally designed to provide basic medical […]

29 July 2009 · Main Posts

technobabble

Jeff Sparrow

Every time I get excited about new media, I read someone from Wired magazine peddling breathless techno-utopian hype and suddenly the future seems like it will resemble the past, only much, much worse. Here, for instance, is Chris Anderson interviewed in Salon. Mr. Anderson, let’s talk about the future of journalism. This is going to […]

28 July 2009 · Main Posts

the best argument against the Kindle

Jeff Sparrow

There’s a boilerplate article about new reading technology: you commission an ancient writerly type to trial the thing, encouraging them to make self-deprecating remarks about their bumblefingered relation to technology and their innate love of leather bindings. (I always end up visualising a hypothetical encounter between, say, Normal Mailer and an early computer, circa 1971, […]

27 July 200927 July 2009 · Main Posts

a national publishing house?

Jeff Sparrow

In her book The Content Makers, Margaret Simons points out that Rupert Murdoch kept the Australian, that unflinching champion of market forces, even though it has lost money for most of its existence. Even today, it’s still probably not profitable enough to survive as an ordinary investment. In other words, the Oz remains alive despite […]

24 July 200927 July 2009 · Main Posts

some thoughts on Twilight

Jeff Sparrow

For reasons too depressing to explain, I spent a few hours last night reading Twilight, the first installment in Stephanie Meyer’s teenage vampire series. It is, dear reader, a deeply strange book. Ok, there’s been a lot of press about Meyer’s Mormonism and how her social conservatism informs the novels. Sarah Seltzer puts it like […]

21 July 2009 · Main Posts

Australian literature rises from its grave

Jeff Sparrow

Our little Oz Lit comp proved remarkably productive. Who wouldn’t want to read titles such as The Man Who Loved to Eat Children, My Brother Vlad, The Mandible that Signed the Paper, Summer Of The 17th Golem, Picnic at Hanging Rope, Seven Pickled Australians or Tomorrow, When the War Began With Mars? But after great […]

21 July 2009 · Main Posts

readings gig tomorrow night

Jeff Sparrow

Sorry for the shameless self-promotion but I’m doing a conversation about Killing with Jonathan Green from Crikey tomorrow. The details are here. If you are at a loose end, come and say hi — it would be kinda nice to meet face-to-face people one only knows from the intertubes.

21 July 200921 July 2009 · Main Posts

a despatch from another world

Jeff Sparrow

Vladimir Nabokov discusses Lolita with, I think, Lionel Trilling on a fifties TV show. It’s funny: Lolita seems so contemporary but the clip reminds us how much literary culture — indeed, culture as a whole — has changed. Could you imagine a television today devoting so much time to tweedy, pipe-puffing bookmen?

18 July 200918 July 2009 · Main Posts

another nail in the coffin of literature

Jeff Sparrow

Over the jump you can see the trailer for what the publisher describes as ‘the hotly anticipated follow-up to Quirk Books’ international best seller, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies‘. It’s entitled, of course, Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters. If you want to watch Mr Willoughby torn apart by a giant squid (and let’s face […]

16 July 200916 July 2009 · Main Posts

responding to the Productivity Committee

Jeff Sparrow

I’ve been slow in reacting to the Productivity Committee’s report on opening up the book market, mostly because it’s insanely busy here at the moment but also because I’ve been struggling to articulate a coherent position. I’m not quite sure I’ve reached that point yet but here are some thoughts nonetheless. The people behind the […]

14 July 200914 July 2009 · Main Posts

workshop on political writing

Jeff Sparrow

Simonne Michelle-Wells has blogged her reaction to the Master Class Overland‘s Rjurik Davidson facilitated on political writing. There’s a link here, in which your correspondent has a walk-on role as a desperate alcoholic. I should say that the brief discussions I had with participants after the class were actually really inspiring: it was great talking […]

13 July 2009 · Main Posts

I wanna be autotuned

Jeff Sparrow

Not their best work but still worth it for Sarah Palin.

11 July 2009 · Main Posts

American Flag Bikini Moments: What’s YOUR Favorite?

Jeff Sparrow

In the search for an online model to replace the deadtree newspaper, too much of the discussion focuses on the technology and not enough on the way that the technology actually gets used. Case in point is the Huffington Post, the phenomenally successful group blog which gets namechecked in all such discussions, largely because it […]

10 July 2009 · Main Posts

Bruno as minstrel show?

Jeff Sparrow

In Salon, David Rakoff reviews the new Sacha Baron Cohen film: The months of planted news stories (like the fashion show disrupted by our Velcro-clad hero who stumbled onto the runway from backstage, dozens of pricey outfits stuck to him), his name with its saucy umlaut spray-painted everywhere, all pointing to the same thing: that […]

10 July 2009 · Main Posts

there are icicles in hell …

Jeff Sparrow

… and a decent Op Ed piece in the Oz today. David Brophy writes: ON a research trip to Urumqi earlier this year, I couldn’t help but notice the presence of tanks and artillery on the city’s outskirts. That firepower now has been deployed to the streets of Urumqi’s southern neighbourhoods, where the city’s minority […]

6 July 20096 July 2009 · Main Posts

Readings and Writings: 40 Years in Books

Jeff Sparrow

You might have seen that Readings, the legendary Carlton bookshop (OK, I know it’s in other places as well now but it’s located in Carlton on the spiritual plane) is celebrating its anniversary by publishing a collection of short stories by Australian writers.The Readings site explains: Readings and Writings is a collection of new Australian […]

6 July 2009 · Main Posts

two writers

Jeff Sparrow

I’ve been re-reading One Market Under God for an article I’m supposed to be writing and I’ve been struck, once again, by what a fantastic writer Thomas Frank is. Frank was the editor of the legendary Baffler (which is now apparently about to be revived) before writing The Conquest of Cool, One Market Under God and […]

2 July 2009 · Main Posts

China Mieville and the future of Melbourne

Jeff Sparrow

The various Overland events at the Melbourne Writers’ Festival are now listed here. You’ll note that Overland 196 features a special supplement (made possible by the City of Melbourne) with SF writers imagining different futures for the city. We’re very pleased that joining the panel will be the utterly awesome British writer China Mieville. You […]

30 June 200930 June 2009 · Main Posts

other people die, too

Jeff Sparrow

You might have heard that Michael Jackson died recently. No, really — he did. I was of the generation that had Thriller shoved down our throats, and that’s spoiled any appreciation I might have had of Jackson’s talents. People say that Off the Wall is a good record and maybe that’s so. As for his […]

29 June 2009 · Main Posts

Time to study Australia’s role in the tragedy of Iraq

Jeff Sparrow

From Crikey today: Our arrival into the military airport in Baghdad was like something from the ‘Charlie Don’t Surf’ scene in the movie Apocalypse Now — US air force jets taking off and landing, Iraqi forces with a heavy presence, US helicopters flying low and loudly across the skies, and the four Australian light-armoured vehicles […]

27 June 2009 · Main Posts

overland underground

Jeff Sparrow

Under Hawthorn with @Sophiec and Doug.

24 June 2009 · Main Posts

Australian places defined by music or books

Jeff Sparrow

That’s Nina Simone’s ‘Baltimore’, and when I was briefly there last year, the words kept going through my head. In fact, you can’t travel anywhere in the US without hearing music, since just about every place name has a song attached to it. Anyway, I was wondering about local equivalents, in either books or music, […]

23 June 2009 · Main Posts

‘Laughing at the Disabled’ goes to court — again

Jeff Sparrow

The Australian reports that Michael Noonan, a Phd student at QUT, is now suing two academics over comments they made in the Oz about his thesis. It’s the latest development in a long-running saga that throws up a bunch of questions about disability, humour and the academy. Noonan’s thesis, you see, was entitled ‘Laughing at […]

21 June 2009 · Main Posts

Big Red Book fair this weekend

Jeff Sparrow

A reminder that the New International Bookshop takes over Trades Hall this weekend for the annual Big Red Book Fair. Details below: Are you stimulated by Kevin’s package, but lacking the appropriate retail outlet for your consuming passion? The Big Red Book Fair offers an elegant and discreet solution. For one weekend only, this 20 […]

18 June 2009 · Main Posts

Guy Rundle launches Killing

Jeff Sparrow

On the subject of book launches, the details of mine are below: Guy Rundle launches Killing: Misadventures in Violence by Jeff Sparrow 6 for 6:30pm Thursday 16 July Bella Union Bar, Trades Hall HOW HARD IS IT TO KILL, AS A HUNTER ON A KANGAROO CULL, AS A WORKER IN! AN ABBATOIR, AS AN EXECUTIONER […]

18 June 2009 · Main Posts

the novel has landed

Jeff Sparrow

Congratulations to Overland‘s Kalinda Ashton on the publication of her novel The Danger Game (seen here artfully posed here in the Overland photo studio). More details of launches and such soon.

18 June 2009 · Main Posts

a mag on your iPhone

Jeff Sparrow

A week or so ago, I posted a link to an experiment conducted by Ann Kirschner, in which she compared the experience of reading Little Dorrit as paperback, audiobook, on the Kindle and on the iPhone. Rather surprisingly, she came down on the side of the iPhone, largely on the basis that it was with […]

17 June 2009 · Main Posts

God hates the world

Jeff Sparrow

Here’s what happens if you take the doctrine of the Fall to its logical conclusion: the creepy followers of the loony bigot preacher Fred Phelps singing along to ‘We are the world’ with new lyrics explaining how God hates us all. Yes, it’s really called ‘God hates the world’. If you didn’t laugh, you’d cry.

16 June 200917 June 2009 · Main Posts

copyrights and wrongs

Jeff Sparrow

Lynne Spender’s essay on Google books and copyright in the latest Meanjin spurred one of the more feisty sessions at the Sydney Writers Festival, with the attendees divided between those who passionately agreed and those who vehemently opposed.. ABC Radio’s Book Show staged a return bout, with Lynne debating author Morris Gleitzman. The whole thing […]

16 June 2009 · Main Posts

death of a letter writer

Jeff Sparrow

The Age today reports the death of Constance E Little, a name that will probably mean nothing to anyone outside Melbourne but has distinct resonances for Victorians over a certain age. She was a constant (if you pardon the pun) fixture of the Age letter pages, and her passing provides another opportunity to reflect on […]

14 June 2009 · Main Posts

by royal request

Jeff Sparrow

The new poet laureate Carol Duffy has published her first poem since landing the new gig. One might wonder why she accepted the job, given that it implicates her in the undemocratic and increasingly bizarre institution of royalty, and has widely been seen as the ruination of the previous poets who took it on. Plus […]

13 June 2009 · Main Posts

Dorrit goes digital

Jeff Sparrow

Interesting experiment: Ann Kirschner compares the experience of reading Little Dorrit as paperback, audiobook, on the Kindle and on the iPhone. How does she fare? The iPhone proves a surprise winner: I abandoned the Kindle edition of Little Dorrit almost as soon as I read one chapter on my iPhone. Kindle, shmindle. It does almost […]

11 June 200911 June 2009 · Main Posts

Wright, Macrae, Martinkus

Jeff Sparrow

Online now is Clare Wright’s piece on Lola Montez, Andrew Macrae’s review of local SF and John Martinkus’ memoir of journalism in Afghanistan, which begins as follows: In September 2005, it seemed from afar that things were going well for Afghanistan: so well that my first proposed story on that country had already been cut from twenty-five to fifteen […]

11 June 2009 · Main Posts

Marley and me

Jeff Sparrow

If you listen to reggae a lot, it’s easy to underrate Bob Marley. Partly, the songs of his that get radio play are the more cheesy moments of his later career: the rather sacharine recut of ‘One Love’, comes to mind. But it’s also the strange paradox that, while Marley remains the international face of […]

9 June 2009 · Main Posts

why not here?

Jeff Sparrow

I wrote something for Crikey this morning on the stunning successes of the far-Right in the European election. I can’t link to it since the new Crikey website continues to baffle me (like, I’m sure the article is there somewhere but I have no idea where) but here’s the start: Yorkshire has just returned as […]

8 June 2009 · Main Posts

Hugo Race and Mario Merola

Jeff Sparrow

Many people might know Hugo Race from his work with Nick Cave’s Bad Seeds, the Wreckery and, more recently, his own band True Spirit. But he’s also a writer. In Overland 195, he discusses the culture and music of Sicily, and his growing obsession with the singer and actor Mario Merola. Here’s Merola in full […]

7 June 2009 · Main Posts

cats — is there anything they can’t do?

Jeff Sparrow

Via Boing Boing, the amazing cat workout. (There’s a nice keyboard cat variant, too.

7 June 2009 · Main Posts

the Red Orchestra

Jeff Sparrow

The Holocaust must be remembered. But the way it’s remembered is equally important. Too often, the genocide gets represented as an act of unthinkable evil. That’s an evasion. Obviously, the Holocaust was evil but it wasn’t unthinkable — it happened, after all. Anyone can condemn abstract monsters but the Holocaust challenges us precisely because the […]

5 June 2009 · Main Posts

all your books are belong to us

Jeff Sparrow

Suddenly, a new contender enters the arena: In discussions with publishers at the annual BookExpo convention in New York over the weekend, Google signaled its intent to introduce a program by that would enable publishers to sell digital versions of their newest books direct to consumers through Google. The move would pit Google against Amazon.com, […]

2 June 20092 June 2009 · Main Posts

but can you eat it?

Jeff Sparrow

Gruffy responds to the advance copies of my book Killing with the magisterial indifference she reserves for the non-edible world. Me, on the other hand, well, I’m quite chuffed.

1 June 2009 · Main Posts

the price of abortions in America

Jeff Sparrow

Dr George Tiller was one of the final three doctors in the entire United States prepared to perform late term abortions. Now he’s been shot dead. His murder wasn’t entirely unexpected, given the constant harassment suffered by US abortion providers. The Daily Beast has an account of what Tiller had previously been through. Tiller’s clinic […]

1 June 20091 June 2009 · Main Posts

testing, plus ‘Jesus is a friend of mine’

Jeff Sparrow

Just need to test something here − and what better test post than Sonseed singing ‘Jesus is a friend of mine’? Warning, though: it’s insanely catchy and you end up with lyrics like ‘I tried to run and hide, but Jesus came and found me, and he touched me down inside’ (yes, really!) stuck in […]

31 May 20091 June 2009 · Main Posts

writing and real work

Jeff Sparrow

The NYT extract from Matthew B. Crawford’s book Shop Class as Soulcraft resonated with me and I wondered what others thought. After taking his PhD in philosophy, Crawford became a motorbike mechanic, and the essay deals with why he finds so much more satisfaction working with his hands repairing bikes than from much more prestigious […]

30 May 2009 · Main Posts

signals, noise and other things

Jeff Sparrow

The novelist and blogger James Bradley is currently hosting an interesting discussion about the problems and perils of literary journals venturing onlineee. Here’s a taste: Meanjin has decided to create a separate entity which complements and extends the print version of the magazine by providing content specifically created for an online environment. All of which […]

30 May 2009 · Main Posts

more on the unreleased torture photos

Jeff Sparrow

The Daily Beast is now confirming the Telegraph‘s description about the Abu Ghraib photos that Obama won’t release. A senior military officer familiar with the photos told me that they would likely provoke a storm of outrage if released. The well-informed source confirmed, just as reported in the Telegraph, that many of the photographs are […]

29 May 2009 · Main Posts

more on copyright, e-books and the rest of it

Jeff Sparrow

One of the more controversial sessions at the SWF was Lynn Spender’s CAL-Meanjin lecture on copyright, a presentation of an essay that appears in the latest Meanjin. I didn’t hear the lecture but in the essay Lynn discusses the Google book digitalisation project and makes what seems to me the fairly sensible point that current […]

28 May 200910 September 2009 · Left front page

Jeff Sparrow

what’s going on

28 May 200928 May 2009 · Main Posts

the unbearable whiteness of SF

Jeff Sparrow

Junot Díaz’s Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao made (or at least implied) two interesting arguments about SF and minorities. Firstly, the preoccupation of the central character with SF (or more strictly fantasy) is portrayed as part of his general weirdness and isolation. It’s middle-class white kids who obsess about Tolkein, not teenagers from […]

27 May 200927 May 2009 · Main Posts

sound and fury

Jeff Sparrow

This ran in Crikey a few days ago (would link to it but can’t figure out where their new site puts content): Clare Werbeloff is Australian for Sarah Palin. Well, not quite. Palin’s still talked about as a Republican candidate for the next presidential poll whereas the Werbeloff express will probably come to a screeching […]

26 May 200926 May 2009 · Main Posts

this may be a little bumpy

Jeff Sparrow

We’re just experimenting with a new comments plugin so there might be a little turbulence for the next day or so. [Added: OK, that seems to have been easier than I thought. If you’ve commented here before, you will have to set up a new account with Intense Debate. But it’s really easy and it […]

25 May 200925 May 2009 · Main Posts

fiction from 195 now online

Jeff Sparrow

We’ve started getting the contents of Overland 195 up onto the site. You can now read the stories by Miranda Siemienowicz, Kristel Thornell, Laurie Clancy and Andrew Fuhrmann, as well as poems by Sarah-Jane Norman and Astrid Lorange from the Overland Judith Wright Prize for New and Emerging Poets. As always, if you like what you read, we’d […]

24 May 200924 May 2009 · Main Posts

saving Salt publishing

Jeff Sparrow

This is kind of a chain letter but still worth reading: Saving Salt Publishing: Just One Book A note from Chris Emery, publishser of Salt in Britain: As many of you will know, Jen and I have been struggling to keep Salt moving since June last year when the economic downturn began to affect our […]

24 May 2009 · Main Posts

Sydney Writers’ Festival

Jeff Sparrow

Back from the SWF now. Didn’t actually get to go to anything much, other than events in which I was directly involved — the problem is that you are either preparing for sessions or recovering from them. Rjurik’s already posted something about the Greer event but there’s varying assessments of it floating around the web. […]

24 May 200924 May 2009 · Main Posts

argh! the stupid! it burns!

Jeff Sparrow

Yesterday’s Overland session on climate change at the Sydney Writers Festival seems to have fanned the low-level cretinism normally gusting out from the Quadrant blog (cf the notorious Sally-Warhaft-is-a-dumb-blonde post) into a veritable tornado of idiocy. Take, for instance, this little item: When the Sydney [Left] Writers’ Festival hold a phoney “forum” on climate change […]

23 May 2009 · Main Posts

normal service will be resumed shortly

Jeff Sparrow

Apologies for light blogging. Was planning to update regularly from the Sydney Writers’ Festival but it just hasn’t been possible. Back soon.

21 May 200922 May 2009 · Main Posts

What is Overland?

Jeff Sparrow

And welcome to Overland, Age readers. If you’re not familiar with the journal, Overland is an Australian literary institution, published continuously since 1954. You can read more about its history here. This front page functions as a group blog; recent back issues of the print journal are available free online here. You can see the […]

20 May 200929 May 2009 · Main Posts

Jeff Sparrow

Twitter Updates follow me on Twitter

20 May 2009 · Main Posts

as devastating as ever

Jeff Sparrow

Noam Chomsky’s got a piece in Salon, the first time (I think) they’ve published him. Indeed, Chomsky seems to have been relatively quiet recently, perhaps because he’s now over eighty. But the Salon piece both reminds you of all his strengths: in particular, his willingness to push beyond the polite consensus to reach discomforting conclusions. […]

19 May 200919 May 2009 · Main Posts

Meanjin and Overland: in print and at the SWF

Jeff Sparrow

The June edition of both Meanjin and Overland are in their respective houses and Meanjin and Overland’s superfriends two for one deal is still on the table. The true awesomeness of the deal is explained over the jump or you can go here for more details. We’re also hoping you’ll come and see us at […]

19 May 2009 · Main Posts

you’ve seen one History War, you’ve seen them all

Jeff Sparrow

There’s a fascinating article at The National about the debates in Russia over the reputation of Leonid Khrushchev, the eldest son of Nikita Khrushchev. Because the clique around Putin wants to rehabilitate Stalin (or, at least, discredit those who attack hm), they seek to trash Nikita Khrushchev, since he delivered the so-called ‘Secret Speech’, at […]

16 May 2009 · Main Posts

bring to light the hidden things of darkness

Jeff Sparrow

Apparently, SBS already had some of the torture photos that Obama now says he won’t release. Now, of course, there’s hard evidence that these acts weren’t the result of the few depraved guards who have been punished but rather the implementation of carefully calibrated techniques designed by senior officials who won’t be punished. Looking at […]

16 May 2009 · Main Posts

Jack Kerouc: role-playing gamer

Jeff Sparrow

The NYT has an account of how Jack Kerouac, idealised by undergraduate creative writing students the world over for his hard-drinkin’, hard-livin ways, invented his own weird baseball card game, which he apparently played all through his life. Almost all his life Jack Kerouac had a hobby that even close friends and fellow-Beats like Allen […]

15 May 2009 · Main Posts

DIY book promotion

Jeff Sparrow

Via Boing Boing, some tips for DIY promotion from Jeff Vandermeer: The integrity/quality of your brand across products affects your ability to gain leverage across your career. Inconsistency from creative project to creative project breeds indecision among readers. Variety between projects, so long as quality is high, may slow your progress but result in rewards […]

15 May 200915 May 2009 · Main Posts

won’t someone think of the children?

Jeff Sparrow

Piers Ackerman on Wayne Swan’s budget: ‘Australians will be paying nearly $9 billion per year in interest alone to service this, more than is spent on housing and infrastructure combined. Even at this rate, every man, woman and child will be burdened with a debt of more than $9000 until the borrowings are paid off […]

14 May 2009 · Main Posts

in these times

Jeff Sparrow

Apologies for the descent into Youtubism but the Chantells seems somehow appropriate right at the moment.

13 May 200913 May 2009 · Main Posts

risking blood on his hands

Jeff Sparrow

A piece from the Age today: NAZI hunter Simon Wiesenthal was often asked why he pursued old men about events from so long ago. He replied: “I am someone who seeks justice, not revenge. My work is a warning to the murderers of tomorrow that they will never rest.” Those words highlight everything wrong about […]

13 May 2009 · Main Posts

a mouthpiece of depravity duly rewarded

Jeff Sparrow

You’ll be pleased to learn that John Yoo, the notorious author of the Bush administration’s ‘torture memos’, has just been made a regular columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer. His appointment comes as we learn more about what his interrogation recommendations actually meant. For instance, sleep deprivation — big joke, yes? Why, a lot of people […]

12 May 2009 · Main Posts

and now expect more of it

Jeff Sparrow

Further to this bizzo about an Australian Phoenix Program in Afghanistan, here’s Slate on the new NATO command in Afghanistan, one Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who seems to have a background in Pheonix-style counterinsurgency : [I]n his press conference, Gates referred to McChrystal’s “unique skill set in counterinsurgency.”[…] For the past year, McChrystal has been director […]

12 May 2009 · Main Posts

the Phoenix Program in Afghanistan

Jeff Sparrow

You know, a decade ago, if someone had told me that senior politicians would soon be openly boasting about carrying out torture (cf Dick Cheney’s latest interview), I’d have thought them a little overheated — even more so, if they’d suggested that Australia would be running an assassination program based on the Vietnam-era Phoenix Program. […]

12 May 200912 May 2009 · Main Posts

a beauty pageant in the Garden of Gethsemane

Jeff Sparrow

If you follow the American media, you’ll know of the latest skirmish in the increasingly insane culture wars. At this year’s Miss USA pageant, California sent as its representative one Carrie Prejean, a woman whose disconcertingly Aryan features received surgical augmentation funded by the pageant organisers themselves (apparently, that’s how these things are run). Anyway, […]

12 May 200912 May 2009 · Main Posts

Wordplay spoken word event

Jeff Sparrow

10 May 2009 · Main Posts

now here’s a surprise

Jeff Sparrow

You’ll remember how, at the G20 demonstrations, a passing newspaper vendor died about being struck by a policeman. Now a British MP says he saw an undercover cop acting as a provocateur at the demonstration: An MP who was involved in last month’s G20 protests in London is to call for an investigation into whether […]

10 May 2009 · Main Posts

writers and insomnia

Jeff Sparrow

John Elder wrote in the Age this morning about how often sleep disorders are wrongly diagnosed. One of the interesting points in the piece related to questions of causality in insomnia and mental illness: insomnia tends to get treated as a symptom of depression rather than the other way around. Anyway, it made me wonder […]

8 May 2009 · Main Posts

the Starbucks logo and Greg Sheridan

Jeff Sparrow

Critiquing Greg Sheridan loses its charm once you discover that, in the computer program that writes his columns, stupidity is a feature and not a bug. Today, however, we should make the effort, given that he pops up on Arts and Letters Daily. Did you know the woman in the Starbucks logo is Queen Esther […]

7 May 2009 · Main Posts

some deaths are bigger than others

Jeff Sparrow

Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (h/t Lenin’s Tomb) draws attention to the remarkable discrepancy in media coverage of the Darfur crisis compared to the crisis in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The situation in the Congo is, as it happens, much, much worse. FAIR notes: The wars that have wracked the Democratic Republic of […]

5 May 2009 · Main Posts

we’re going to burn

Jeff Sparrow

Maybe I’m too pessimistic but I just can’t see now how there’s now going to be any serious action on climate change in the short to medium term. As Bernard Keane argues, the Rudd government’s latest amendments to its emissions trading scheme represents ‘almost complete surrender to the largest polluters, who will now face virtually […]

3 May 2009 · Main Posts

top ten titles

Jeff Sparrow

Via Andrew Sullivan, here’s a compilation of the top ten titles submitted to Virginia Quarterly Review over the last two years. Would be interesting to see an Australian equivalent. My guess is it would include ‘Sex’ somewhere. The ten most common titles of submissions that we’ve received in the past two years: Untitled Aubade Gravity […]

2 May 2009 · Main Posts

who would Jesus torture?

Jeff Sparrow

Just about anyone, it seems. New data from the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life suggests that regular church goers in the US are significantly more likely to support the torture of suspected terrorists than those who worship rarely or not at all. The result illustrates the remarkable pliability of religion. You’d […]

1 May 20091 May 2009 · Main Posts

a new low for literary journals

Jeff Sparrow

If you visit the Quadrant homepage today, you’ll find, nestled amongst the usual batty climate denialism, a section entitled ‘Quadrant TV’. The lead headline runs: ‘We’ve found a new editor for the Monthly‘. Beneath it, there’s a You Tube clip entitled ‘Dumb blonde: are you smarter than a fifth grader’, in which a young woman […]

30 April 2009 · Main Posts

humans are amazing

Jeff Sparrow

Gets especially freakish around 1 min 35.

30 April 2009 · Main Posts

the war on refugees

Jeff Sparrow

This is a thing from Crikey a few days back. Somebody should give Sri Lanka’s high commissioner to Australia Senaka Walgampaya a cabinet post, for he has just encapsulated the logic of Australian refugee policy into a few pithy lines. Discussing the prospect of Tamils fleeing the Sri Lankan army campaign, he assured the public: […]

28 April 2009 · Main Posts

the slow death of newspapers: part 758

Jeff Sparrow

The NYT reports that the print circulation of US newspapers dropped by another 7 per cent: Of the top 25 newspapers in the United States, all posted declines in circulation except for The Wall Street Journal, which eked out a 0.6 percent gain, according to the figures released by the Audit Bureau of Circulations. For […]

28 April 200928 April 2009 · Main Posts

the contemptous-rock-stars-versus-idiotic-journalists Youtube war is on

Jeff Sparrow

At its new ‘Spike’ blog, Meanjin has launched a fresh provocation (ostensibly by way of promoting the Meanjin–Overland discounted sub deal, of which you may have heard some mention here). They’ve posted a clip of a fantastically debauched-looking Lou Reed treating some moronic Australian reporters with utter contempt. Well, we yield to no-one when it […]

25 April 2009 · Main Posts

would they let Sassoon march?

Jeff Sparrow

In the course of writing my book Killing (due out in July), I read a lot of the literature from the First World War. Or re-read, I guess, cos you can’t help but encounter much of it (or at least Owen and perhaps Sassoon) in high school. But looking at it again, I was struck […]

25 April 2009 · Main Posts

the Pavlov’s dog of newspapers

Jeff Sparrow

As soon as you learned that Sally Warhaft had resigned from the Monthly, you knew (despite having no knowlege whatsoever of the circumstances behind her departure) that the Australian would rub its nasty little hands together in glee. And, lo, so it came to pass. Robert Manne! Kevin Rudd! Drool! Drool! Whatever your opinion of […]

24 April 2009 · Main Posts

from now on Overland will be autotuned

Jeff Sparrow

24 April 2009 · Main Posts

and what if they don’t follow the script?

Jeff Sparrow

A point that’s been missed in the discussion of the Bush torture memos is that interrogators always go further than regulations allow. Police in the developed world aren’t supposed to beat prisoners in cells but everyone knows that, like, some of them do. Naturally, then, if the official instructions permit interrogators to waterboard, to slap […]

24 April 2009 · Main Posts

a warning from the newspaper biz

Jeff Sparrow

Former newspaper media director Brendan Sherar goes Ancient Mariner in this interesting post, warning that publishers need to come to terms with technology now or else suffer the same awful fate currently besetting the traditional newspapers: [L]ately, I’ve been getting nervous when I hear people dismissively say, “Oh, people will always want the printed book. […]

24 April 200924 April 2009 · Main Posts

what it means to have a life

Jeff Sparrow

John Crace at the Guardian books blog distinguishes JG Ballard from most writers today on that basis that Ballard had accumulated some experiences before putting pen to paper: Before he had even got his first short story published in the late 1950s, Ballard had survived the Japanese occupation of Shanghai, been separated from his parents, […]

22 April 2009 · Main Posts

scariest Twitter update ever

Jeff Sparrow

Just received this message from Twitter: ‘Karl Rove (KarlRove) is now following your updates on Twitter.’

22 April 2009 · Main Posts

modesty prevents them

Jeff Sparrow

Being such shy, retiring types, my co-editors have been all coy about their achievements. Lacking inhibitions of that kind, I note that Rjurik will soon publish a book of his short stories in Britain, while Kalinda‘s novel The Danger Game is rapidly taking shape. Here’s some of the encomiums it has attracted: ‘Kalinda Ashton’s The […]

21 April 2009 · Main Posts

the Overland novel project

Jeff Sparrow

Last year Overland began the search for an unpublished literary novel, which we intended to publish as Overland issue 196. The novel search was an intervention into the debate about the state of literary publishing in Australia: it is difficult to get a literary novel published; less time is put in by publishers into the […]

21 April 200921 April 2009 · Main Posts

discounted joint subscriptions with Meanjin

Jeff Sparrow

We’re now offering a discounted joint subscription with Meanjin (and hello to ‘Spike’, the new Meanjin blog). Basically, if you subscribe to both mags, the adult rate’s reduced to $110. It’s spectacularly cheap and it clears your conscience for an entire year, since with one click of the mouse you can do your bit to […]

19 April 2009 · Main Posts

the CIA waterboarded a prisoner 183 times in a month

Jeff Sparrow

What can you possibly say? This from Emptywheel (via Huff Post). According to the May 30, 2005 Bradbury memo, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times in March 2003 and Abu Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times in August 2002. On page 37 of the OLC memo, in a passage discussing the differences between SERE techniques […]

19 April 200919 April 2009 · Main Posts

statesmen and criminals

Jeff Sparrow

Andrew Sullivan correctly describes the newly released Bush torture memo as: [a] chilling an artefact as you are ever likely to read in a democratic society, the work clearly not of a lawyer assessing torture techniques in good faith, but of an administration official tasked with finding how torture techniques already decided upon can be […]

18 April 2009 · Main Posts

school age homophobia

Jeff Sparrow

This from Salon: On Thursday, Judith Warner wrote about both Carl Walker-Hoover and Eric Mohat, a 17-year-old who shot himself after a bully flat-out suggested he should, adding “no one will miss you.” And once again, the tormenters were focused on the victim’s failure to conform to gender norms, so the bullying manifested as vicious […]

17 April 2009 · Main Posts

deliberately pouring petrol

Jeff Sparrow

This seems too obvious to need saying but then again perhaps not. Suppose that, after the Victorian bushfires, a group of survivors took shelter in a nearby town. Suppose that the house in which they stayed somehow caught fire and killled a bunch of people. Would the media and politicians immediately start speculating, before any […]

16 April 2009 · Main Posts

advertising blitz

Jeff Sparrow

Our latest 3RR ad has now manifested: you can hear it by clicking here.

15 April 2009 · Main Posts

pirates, terrorists, whatever

Jeff Sparrow

As liberal America convulses in ecstacy over the willingness of their guy to pull the trigger on pirates, it’s worth thinking a little more about Somalia, since it’s not out of the question that we’ll be seeing another wonderful humanitarian intervention there before too long. Consider, then, Johann Hari’s analysis: In 1991, the government of […]

13 April 200914 April 2009 · Main Posts

Amazon sex police

Jeff Sparrow

Amazon.com has apparently decided to protect its readers from themselves by removing any titles it considered ‘adult’ from its sales rankings, thus making them impossible to uncover through normal searchings. Funnily enough, this outbreak of Grundyism wipes out most of the titles aimed at a gay and lesbian readership. More than that, Amazon now hides […]

12 April 200913 April 2009 · Main Posts

terrorism poster remix

Jeff Sparrow

The other day, I stumbled across one of those creepy national security posters – coincidentally, it was at a bus stop outside the Maribyrnong Detention Centre, thus uniting two of the abiding images of the Howard years in one horrid flashback. I can’t find a decent size reproduction of the image but you’ll probably know […]

10 April 2009 · Main Posts

Greg Sheridan’s mild democrat

Jeff Sparrow

In his column today, Greg Sheridan explains that Israel’s new foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman is, contrary to what you might have heard, really ‘a democrat and, by broader Middle East standards, an extremely mild politician’. Really? Compare the analysis by Neve Gordon from the Department of Politics and Government, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. Lieberman […]

9 April 20099 April 2009 · Main Posts

the logic of rage murders

Jeff Sparrow

This is a Crikey piece from a few days back — an extension of some ideas from my forthcoming book Killing: In the last four weeks alone, six mass shootings have killed 47 people in the United States. Perversely, until the last three massacres took place within a single twenty-four period, the very frequency of […]

8 April 20099 April 2009 · Main Posts

the threat from Iran

Jeff Sparrow

Next time you hear about the terrible threat posed by Iran or North Korea or whatever other country is currently supposed to be leading the Axis of Scary, bear this graph in mind.

8 April 2009 · Main Posts

Bob Ellis audio

Jeff Sparrow

You can listen to Bob Ellis’ speech from the other night here (ht, Crikey and Elanor McInerney).

7 April 2009 · Main Posts

the decline of newspaper book reviewing continues

Jeff Sparrow

This from the Guardian‘s book pages: More bloodshed from the world of literary journalism. Scotland’s Sunday Herald joins the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Independent on Sunday and the Daily Telegraph in peremptorily abbreviating its coverage of new books. Sunday Herald’s literary editor, Alan Taylor, a convivial figure in the Scots literary landscape, […]

3 April 20093 April 2009 · Main Posts

Bob Ellis on Rudd, Labor and everything

Jeff Sparrow

The Bob Ellis essay from Overland 194 is now available online. It opens like this: Fourteen months in, the Rudd government is not as approved or acclaimed as it would like to be, nor its party workers as glad-hearted in victory as they thought they would be. A distinct odour of busy, prim dullness encloses […]

3 April 2009 · Main Posts

whatever happened to 2020?

Jeff Sparrow

A piece for Crikey, now reprinted at Larvatus Prodeo It’s quite astonishing that the public figure who yesterday pointed out that the deadline for Kevin Rudd’s response to ideas from his 2020 summit had quietly come and gone was Peter Costello. Naturally, Costello has his own agenda. But where were the summiteers themselves? Do none […]

3 April 2009 · Main Posts

the perpetual crisis of Australian film

Jeff Sparrow

Dave Hoskin, from the current issue. You might not be aware of this but there’s a crisis going on. This particular emergency has been around so long it’s virtually a tradition − at least five years, on and off, and probably longer, if you believe the sterner commentators. We’ve now got to the point that, […]

2 April 2009 · Main Posts

the savagery of the Pacific War

Jeff Sparrow

Nearly got the whole issue online now — and apparently it’s OK to put the Bob Ellis piece up, too, which I’ll do tomorrow. Anyway, I wanted to draw attention to Tom O’Lincon’s polemic about the war in the Pacific during the Second World War. It begins like this: Humour is revealing. Here is a […]

1 April 20091 April 2009 · Main Posts

a Lofo poem

Jeff Sparrow

The cartoonist Lofo has illustrated Overland for yonks. He also writes verse, as below: Why I like Melbourne:A very old-fashioned poem You’ll find no shark In Noble Park, It’s too far from the sea. Snakes do not kill In Yarraville (another place to be). And if you fear The grizzly bear, The tiger and the […]

1 April 2009 · Main Posts

Louise Swinn on the state of the publishing industry

Jeff Sparrow

We’re gradually getting the rest of the issue online and so I thought I’d draw attention to Louise Swinn’s investigation into the health of writing and publishing in Australian. Overland 194 was very much put together in the shadow of the GFC but, after talking to various writers, publishers and agents, Swinn reports a degree […]

31 March 2009 · Main Posts

take that, George Orwell

Jeff Sparrow

Nice story about how TS Eliot, working for a publisher at Faber and Faber, rejected Orwell’s Animal Farm: When Orwell submitted his novel, an allegory on Stalin’s dictatorship, Eliot praised its “good writing” and “fundamental integrity”. However, the book’s politics, at a time when Britain was allied with the Soviet Union against Hitler, were another […]

28 March 2009 · Main Posts

Radical Melbourne and the ‘Summer Read’

Jeff Sparrow

Radical Melbourne, a book my sister Jill and I wrote in 2001, was part of the State Library of Victoria’s Summer Read program, which has now concluded: No 1 I am Melba by Ann Blainey (Black Inc) A gripping account of Dame Nellie Melba’s life, from defying her father and escaping to Paris, to becoming […]

28 March 200928 March 2009 · Main Posts

Overland at the Sydney Writers’ Festival

Jeff Sparrow

The program for the Sydney Writers’ Festival is now available. Overland‘s doing three events, as below: An Evening with Germaine Greer Thursday 21 May, 6-7pm City Recital Hall Since storming into public consciousness in 1970 with The Female Eunuch, her acerbic attack on sexist culture, Germaine Greer has been kicking up dust of one type […]

27 March 2009 · Main Posts

the end of the neoliberal self

Jeff Sparrow

We’re gradually getting the feature articles from Overland 194 online. I’ve just put up Mark Furlong’s piece ‘Crying to be Heard’, a really interesting article about what the GFC means for notions of selfhood. Mark argues: An old Arabic saying suggests that ‘men resemble their times more than their fathers’. An event of the magnitude […]

27 March 2009 · Main Posts

new issue of Wai

Jeff Sparrow

There’s a new issue of Wai out now. You can read it here.

26 March 2009 · Main Posts

the sound of Thatcherism

Jeff Sparrow

Michael Hann has an interesting piece in the Guardian about the reformation of Spandau Ballet: [T]he Tony Hadley homepage on his agent’s website describes the band’s demise thus: “As the Thatcher years drew to a close, Spandau disbanded.” You don’t hit on that formulation by accident. Hadley himself is a committed Conservative who attends party […]

25 March 200925 March 2009 · Main Posts

all singing, all dancing Bob Ellis ad

Jeff Sparrow

With Bob Ellis coming to the State Library of Victoria on Thursday 2 April to speak about his fabulous Overland article, I thought I’d make use of our high-tech AV facilities to showcase our new 3RRR ad. Clickhere to listen to it.

25 March 200925 March 2009 · Main Posts

more on Gaza

Jeff Sparrow

That story about the IDF’s vile t-shirts is in the Age today. Here’s something I wrote for Crikey about it a couple of days ago. How much more do we need to learn about Israel’s war against Gaza? A full-scale assault upon a densely packed urban environment, the strikes against schools, hospitals and universities, the […]

23 March 2009 · Main Posts

Overland 194

Jeff Sparrow

Overland 194 is currently winging its way to subscribers and bookshops. Most of the edition is now available online; the rest will be posted when we get the chance. Overland 194 includes new fiction by Cate Kennedy, Jennifer Mills and David Wolstencroft, reviews by Mungo MacCallum, Carmen Lawrence and Lyndall Ryan, Tim Wright’s winning poem […]

Published in Overland Issue Print Issue 193 Summer 2008 · Main Posts

Issue 193

Jeff Sparrow

Contents Editorial Jeff Sparrow – Editorial Overland Lecture Antony Loewenstein –

23 March 200923 March 2009 · Main Posts

Judith Wright Poetry Prize for New and Emerging Poets

Jeff Sparrow

Last night, Overland poetry editor Keri Glastonbury presented the results of the Overland Judith Wright Poetry Prize for New and Emerging Poets, at a function jointly hosted with the Australian Poetry Centre at the historic ‘Glenfern’ property. Thanks to everyone who attended, all the poets who entered the competition, and to the Malcolm Robertson Foundation […]

21 March 200922 March 2009 · Main Posts

murderers gloat

Jeff Sparrow

After writing the post below, I stumbled on this story, an account of the t-shirts printed, semi-officially it seems, for Israeli soldiers at the end of their deployment or training: ‘One, printed for a platoon of Israeli snipers depicts an armed Palestinian pregnant women caught in the crosshairs of a rifle, with the disturbing caption […]

21 March 2009 · Main Posts

murderers confess

Jeff Sparrow

For many of us, the atrocities committed during the war on Gaza seemed clear enough, what with zillions of tons of high-tech ordinance dropped on densely packed civilian areas. Still, the great and the good managed, for the most part, to maintain the conventional narrative of Israeli ‘purity in arms’, generally by demonising anyone who […]

20 March 200920 March 2009 · Main Posts

great minds (and ours, too)

Jeff Sparrow

By coincidence, Maxine and I both published pieces in Crikey yesterday arguing more or less the same thing. I think the articles are firewalled but perhaps Maxine will concur with the following summary: the Pope’s fulminations about condoms in Africa will lead to thousands of unnecessary deaths. Remember that next time one of these jerks […]

20 March 2009 · Main Posts

More about ‘On the Idea of Communism’

Jeff Sparrow

The Birckbeck Institute for the Humanities’ conference ‘On the Idea of Communism’ seems to me an utterly fascinating phenomenon, not so much in and of itself (there are academic conferences held on all manner of topics), but because the massive response it provoked – this is an event featuring some of the most difficult and […]

18 March 2009 · Main Posts

‘the only political idea worthy of a philosopher’

Jeff Sparrow

That’s a quote from Slovenian Slavoj Zizek, the rock star philosopher, in reference to a conference held last weekend. Birkbeck College this weekend hosted a symposium on the idea of communism. Originally planned as a meeting of philosophers and those who enjoy hearing their debates, the unexpected material circumstances of history instead gave the event […]

17 March 2009 · Main Posts

those Hanson photos

Jeff Sparrow

My Crikey piece on Pauline Hanson is behind the titanium subscriber wall. But it seems to me that, as ghastly as Hanson is, this kind of thing is exactly what fuels right-wing populism. It’s not just that no editor would publish photos of a male politician in his jocks, it’s also that the tabloids would […]

15 March 2009 · Main Posts

The Kindly Ones

Jeff Sparrow

Jonathan LIttell’s Holocaust novel The KIndly Ones has provoked wildly different reactions, simultaneously hailed as a masterpiece and denounced as an exploitative fraud. It’s certainly an ambitious book, absolutely meticulous in its research into the grisly details of mass killing. The novel’s structured as the memoir of Max Aue written towards the end of his […]

14 March 2009 · Main Posts

recession-proof books

Jeff Sparrow

The GFC means bad news for the publishing industry, right? Well, for the most part, yes. But there are some genres that are apparently thriving. Torstar, the company that publishes Harlequin category romances, actually made money in the fourth quarter due to Harlequin sales. In the report, it states: “Harlequin finished the year strongly with […]

13 March 200913 March 2009 · Main Posts

don’t blame the intertubes

Jeff Sparrow

Clive Hamilton generated a lot of discussion in Crikey with an interesting piece arguing that the vicious culture of the blogosphere hindered any genuinely democratic debate. My response runs below. Last week, Clive Hamilton denounced “an ugly culture of dogmatic and belligerent interventions [that] now dominates social and political debate on the Internet”. Anyone who’s […]

12 March 200912 March 2009 · Main Posts

Congratulations, Christos Tsiolkas

Jeff Sparrow

The Slap‘s now won the 2009 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for South East Asia and the Pacific. Nice — and characteristic — quote from Christos here. Tsiolkas’s book was up against Helen Garner’s The Spare Room, Tim Winton’s Breath, Joan London’s The Good Parents, Aravind Adiga’s Between The Assassinations and New Zealander Paula Morris’s Forbidden Cities in […]

11 March 200911 March 2009 · Main Posts

how not to land an agent

Jeff Sparrow

At JacketFlap, a bunch of literary agents list the worst query lines they’ve received. These lists always seem a bit patronising but the examples are all recognisable. Part 3 is headed ‘Only include relevant, professional publishing credentials in your query’. That means you don’t write: My credentials for writing this book include: A divine mandate […]

9 March 2009 · Main Posts

books that matter

Jeff Sparrow

The Washington Times offers a bleak assessment of literary culture on the US campuses: According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, the best-selling titles on college campuses are mostly about hunky vampires or Barack Obama. Recently, Meyer and the president held six of the 10 top spots. In January, the most subversive book on the […]

7 March 2009 · Main Posts

bushfires and climate change

Jeff Sparrow

Just stumbled on this piece from RealClimate, in which David Karoly from Melbourne Uni authoritatively spells out the connection between climate change and the recent bushfire catastrophes. For most people, his conclusion’s probably not much of a surprise but given all the contortions the usual suspects went through to deny any link, it’s worth reading. […]

7 March 2009 · Main Posts

new Harper Collins imprint

Jeff Sparrow

From the New York Times: Just a month after announcing a restructuring that led to layoffs and the shuttering of an entire division, HarperCollins Publishers hopes to jazz up its book lists by opening a new imprint. This fall the company will publish 21 new hardcover and paperback original titles under the It Books imprint, […]

5 March 20095 March 2009 · Main Posts

the aestheticisation of politics

Jeff Sparrow

There’s a clip floating about featuring a particularly odd exchange between snake-lipped hatemonger Ann Coulter and lunatic eliminationist Glen Beck about the Conservative Political Action Conference, a kind of Lollapolooza for right-wing Bedlamites. ‘One thing that is overwhelming about CPAC is all of the hot babes,’ Coulter says. ‘I would be a conservative if we […]

4 March 200920 March 2012 · Main Posts

upper right pod

Jeff Sparrow

The winner of the 2011 Overland Judith Wright Poetry Prize is . . .

3 March 2009 · Main Posts

such, such are the joys

Jeff Sparrow

Nice little spread in the Guardian with writers talking about how they feel about writing. The money quote comes from Hari Kunzru: Beginning is daunting; being in the middle makes you feel like Sisyphus; ending sometimes comes with the disappointment that this finite collection of words is all that remains of your infinitely rich idea. […]

3 March 20093 March 2009 · Main Posts

not demonic, creative

Jeff Sparrow

A bunch of the regular commentators here have noted the weird word combinations thrown up by the Recaptcha anti-spam filter — I remember on one occasion it made me type ‘vodka hag’. The general consensus was that Recaptcha was possessed by Satan. The truth, however, could not be more different. It turns out that every […]

3 March 2009 · Main Posts

another world

Jeff Sparrow

From Salon‘s account of the Conservative Political Action Conference, an annual jamboree for the entirely unhinged: But by far the strangest moment at the podium came during a panel on “Conservative Victories in the 2008 Elections.” (Yes, really.) Nineteen people — with names like Flagg Youngblood, Spear Lancaster and Smoot Carter — sat at the […]

3 March 2009 · Main Posts

twitter and the class struggle

Jeff Sparrow

A couple of weeks ago, the media was full of stories about the glorious future Twitter represented. This week, to coincide with the establishment of the Overland Twitter feed (we’re like the kid who took up hula-hooping just as everyone else got a yo-yo), it’s been all backlash, all the time. Here’s a sample: When […]

1 March 2009 · Main Posts

why the Right likes Orwell

Jeff Sparrow

Julian Barnes’ essay in the New York Review of Books gives a pretty good account of Orwell and, without turning into one of those Stalinist hatchet jobs you still see from time to time (they never forgave him for Homage to Catalonia), helps explain why he’s become so palatable to the Christopher Hitchenses of the […]

1 March 20091 March 2009 · Main Posts

a good news story about publishing

Jeff Sparrow

You become, in these times in particular, accustomed to tale after tale of collapse in literary publishing (or even journalism — here’s another piece about US newspapers crossing a final threshold). But the NYT has a story about a company called Europa Editions which, as it says, has succeeded by publishing ‘roster of translated literary […]

27 February 200927 February 2009 · Main Posts

well famous

Jeff Sparrow

There’s a discussion of the Overland–Meanjin soccer match (a clash at which Overland won a clear moral victory) in that glossy mag that comes with the Fairfax papers. Key moments: Meanjin’s Sophie Cunningham on shoes and Vulgar’s Ian Syson on ‘inner-city knobs’. Plus there’s a passing mention of my fashion sense.

27 February 2009 · Main Posts

a further descent into barbarism

Jeff Sparrow

I’ve started experimenting with an Overland Twitter account. Somehow, this really depresses me. OK, I like blogs, despite the TL;DR factor. Even though Facebook seems inherently inane, I can see that it’s useful, especially for events and so on. But the very idea of Twitter, embodied in its basic question ‘What are you doing?’, seems […]

25 February 200926 February 2009 · Main Posts

War-gaming the counter-revolution

Jeff Sparrow

I hadn’t seen this before I wrote a piece for Crikey today on the return of Pauline Hanson but it illustrates the general point. We’re only a few months into an Obama administration and the recession hasn’t even properly hit yet but they’re already talking on prime time about militias rising up to take back […]

25 February 200925 February 2009 · Main Posts

National Young Writers’ Festival

Jeff Sparrow

Below is the call for submissions of this year’s National Young Writers’ Festival: It’s ridiculously easy to get involved. Should you do it? YES, because it will be completely fun. I’m associate director for the festival this year, and I can tell you that, as well as your classic panels, readings, Festival Club parties, and […]

25 February 2009 · Main Posts

Poetry prize presentation

Jeff Sparrow

After the Australian Poetry Centre’s monthly salon on 22 March, Overland poetry editor Keri Glastonbury announces the winning poems from the $3000 Overland Judith Wright Poetry Prize for New and Emerging Poets, sponsored by the Malcolm Robertson Foundation. There’s a now downloadable flyer for the event available here.

24 February 200910 August 2009 · Main Posts

Jeff Sparrow

Friends and interlocutors VIC Writers’ Centre ACT Writers’ Centre NSW Writers’ Centre NT Writers’ Centre QLD Writers’ Centre SA Writers’ Centre TAS Writers’ Centre WA State Literature Centre Aduki Independent Press Anastomoo New Writing Cottonmouth Cordite Fabians Fellowship of Australian Writers Going Down Swinging Harvest Heat Magazine Island Larvatus Prodeo Letter Vox Leftwrites Meanjin New […]

24 February 200924 February 2009 · Main Posts

Judging Ruddism

Jeff Sparrow

Mark from LP invited me to judge the thread running there on two-word definitions of Ruddism. It’s a spin-off from a competition we ran to promote Bob Ellis’s essay ‘Muscular Timidity’ and his upcoming Melbourne presentation (2 April at the State Library) for the launch of Overland 194. Anyway, the LPers are a very industrious […]

21 February 2009 · Main Posts

Saturday night Ernest Ranglin

Jeff Sparrow

Just because.

20 February 2009 · Main Posts

CAL-Meanjin lecture

Jeff Sparrow

Overland readers might be interested in the event series hosted by Meanjin. Meanjin is pleased to announce the first of the CAL/Meanjin lectures, to be held at the Perth Writers’ Festival (February 28 – March 2). The CAL/Meanjin lecture series, will be held at major writers’ festivals throughout 2009 and 2010. As Australia’s foremost literary […]

20 February 200920 February 2009 · Main Posts

why is there no ABC newspaper?

Jeff Sparrow

In response to the ongoing collapse of the newspaper industry in the US – and the signs that something similar will soon take place here – the case for a public-funded newspaper seems at least as strong as that for a public TV or radio broadcaster. Here’s the current state of play in America. Even […]

19 February 200919 February 2009 · Main Posts

Newstead Short Story Tattoo

Jeff Sparrow

People might be interested in this event, for which Overland is one of the sponsors: For those who came in late, The Newstead Short Story Tattoo is a celebration of the short story form being the only short story festival in Australia. Australian writing has a great tradition of short story writers. Writers from near […]

18 February 20092 November 2011 · Main Posts

front lower left promo

Jeff Sparrow

CAL Connections: for new writers

18 February 200919 February 2009 · Main Posts

audio of Tsiolkas and Loewenstein

Jeff Sparrow

You can now listen, courtesy ABC radio, to streaming audio of the Overland discussion between Christos Tsiolkas and Antony Loewenstein. Check it out here. The ABC glosses it thus: Public intellectuals and the unpopular stance The literary magazine, Overland recently invited two public intellectuals − Christos Tsiolkas and Antony Loewenstein − to discuss the consequences […]

18 February 200918 February 2009 · Main Posts

Overland 194 is ready

Jeff Sparrow

Overland 194 goes to the printer today. The back cover blurb reads: Are we to imagine we can sustain forever an economy based on serving each other in ethnic restaurants and taking Japanese tourists on harbour cruises past the Opera House and robbing high-rollers blind in gambling casinos in an era when nobody much will […]

18 February 200919 February 2009 · Main Posts

that’s me told, then

Jeff Sparrow

In a previous post, I suggested that it didn’t take much courage to proclaim onself an atheist in most developed countries. I still think that’s basically true but I hadn’t counted on exactly how timid the public sphere has become. Australia’s largest outdoor advertising agency, APN Outdoor, rejected an attempt by the Atheist Foundation of […]

17 February 200917 February 2009 · Main Posts

more from the great derangement of the American Right

Jeff Sparrow

As a supplement to the previous post on Michael Ledeen’s discovery of fascism in Obama’s stimulus package, here’s the increasingly porcine Glen Beck talking with Bill O’Reilly about the persecution of US conservatives and how it will lead to revolution. These guys might be whacked out nutcases but they’ve both got top-rating mainstream. Sure, in […]

17 February 2009 · Main Posts

no more pussyfooting

Jeff Sparrow

‘End the pussyfooting’ — over at the Oz, they’re beating the drums for extra troops to Afghanistan, with the classic slogan from colonial wars. Enough fighting with our hands tied behind our back! No more constraints — let’s give those dusky savages some cold steel! As Obama begins his Afghan surge, expect more of this […]

15 February 2009 · Main Posts

wow … just wow

Jeff Sparrow

In his most recent column, the American conservative commentator Michael Ledeen responds to a Newsweek feature entitled ‘We are all socialists now’. Ledeen calls the piece ’embarrassingly ignorant’. Socialism rests on a firm theoretical bedrock: the abolition of private property. I haven’t heard anyone this side of Barney Frank calling for any such thing. What […]

15 February 2009 · Main Posts

more Kindle stuff

Jeff Sparrow

I’m still agnostic about the whole e-book thing but it’s obviously a question with which we’re all going to have to deal. Yes, there’s plenty of people who say that they’ll never abandon paper and ink. But consider this latest piece of functionality: “Our vision is every book, ever printed, in any language, all available […]

14 February 2009 · Main Posts

the end of faith, the beginning of bigotry

Jeff Sparrow

In Australia, Sam Harris doesn’t seem to be terribly well known. In the USA, however, he’s one of the big names of the New Atheism. Which is a pity, since his book The End of Faith is something of a shocker. Like the other New Atheists, Harris is good at exposing the contradictions and cruelties […]

13 February 2009 · Main Posts

Milton Friedman as rhetorical strategy

Jeff Sparrow

It’s bizarre watching intellectual fashions shift. A few years back, most public discussions of economics simply took it for granted that Keynesianism had been discredited and that Friedman was some kind of intellectual powerhouse. Now, you can see the consensus changing all around us. For instance: After World War II, laissez-faire economists had a big […]

13 February 2009 · Main Posts

Wilfred Burchett and the Cold War

Jeff Sparrow

Something weird’s been happening at Crikey over the last few months — a prolonged discussion about the life and politics of Wilfred Burchett. There has been something of a revival of Burchettalia in recent years (a biography, a collection of journalism and so on) but even so you’d think this was more a question to […]

11 February 200911 February 2009 · Main Posts

Ruddism competition at LP

Jeff Sparrow

Kim at Larvatus Prodeo is running a cool little comp, partly inspired by Bob Ellis’ essay in the forthcoming Overland. Check it out here. It is teh funny.

10 February 2009 · Main Posts

Kindle 2.0

Jeff Sparrow

As far as I know the Kindle, Amazon’s e-reader thingo, isn’t actually available in Australia. But in the US, the second generation Kindle has just been launched. Here’s its features: Version 2 is sleeker, 25% thinner, Bezos said, than the size of the #1 bestselling phone (probably an iPhone, but of course, Bezos doesn’t name […]

10 February 200910 February 2009 · Main Posts

literature and parallel importation

Jeff Sparrow

Below’s a piece about parallel importation that appeared in Crikey yesterday. The kind of ‘free trade versus protectionism’ arguments that parallel importation raises will become even more important for the Left in the context of a recession. But they’re not easy, especially in a short article, and in some ways the thing yesterday was a […]

10 February 200919 March 2012 · Main Posts

autumn 2012

Jeff Sparrow

A mysterious death in Melbourne’s west, the European meltdown, the myth of abundance in Australia, CEOs and tech innovation, the results from the 2011 Overland Judith Wright Poetry Prize and much more. Read it at Overland›

7 February 20099 February 2009 · Main Posts

hell in a handbasket

Jeff Sparrow

Here’s the figures for US jobs lost in the current recession (green line) compared to the previous two downturns. How’s that capitalism working out for everyone, then?

7 February 2009 · Main Posts

can this possibly work?

Jeff Sparrow

We will, it seems to me, inevitably end up doing a lot of our reading in digital format. Yes, lots of people say that nothing could replace the feel of paper or the heft of a hardback. But you only have to think of how much time we’re spending reading onscreen now. For many people, […]

6 February 2009 · Main Posts

dunno which makes me feel older …

Jeff Sparrow

… that Lux Interior is dead or that he was sixty when he died.

3 February 20093 February 2009 · Main Posts

just punishment

Jeff Sparrow

I’m at the best phase of a new project — the reading aimlessly stage. Am trying to think about religion and last night started reading Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion. If you pardon the pun, it’s like the curate’s egg — good in parts. Obviously, his stuff on Darwin’s really powerful — he cuts through […]

1 February 20091 February 2009 · Main Posts

Don’t hate me because I’m different

Jeff Sparrow

Last week might have been perfect for bananafish but not so much for chickens. Despite being regularly soaked with water (and eventually ensconced in the shower cubicle), they spent much of the heatwave panting. And, when they weren’t panting, they were attacking the weakest bird in the flock (pictured over the jump), which eventually lost […]

1 February 20091 February 2009 · Main Posts

the Rudd manifesto

Jeff Sparrow

The Monthly has cunningly made available the first 1500 words of Kevin Rudd’s manifesto on the global economic crisis. It’s a significant document, not so much for any argument it makes but because of what its publication represents. Five years ago, no mainstream politician would have dared write a critique of the free market. More […]

31 January 2009 · Main Posts

writing, yes; reading, not so much

Jeff Sparrow

More bleak book news from the New York Times: The point may soon come when there are more people who want to write books than there are people who want to read them. At least, that is what the evidence suggests. Booksellers, hobbled by the economic crisis, are struggling to lure readers. Almost all of […]

30 January 2009 · Main Posts

blogging and journalism

Jeff Sparrow

Margaret Simons has an interesting piece about how much blogging has changed journalists’ perception of their work. Paul Bradshaw says this of his survey: As I pored over the results, I was surprised at just how much these journalists felt their work had been changed by the simple act of blogging. I had expected some […]

30 January 200930 January 2009 · Main Posts

the decline of the literary review

Jeff Sparrow

The piece below ran in Crikey today. It’s a bit garbled, to be honest, but, hey, it’s forty-three bloody degrees. The Louise Swinn piece will run in the next edition, due out on 22 March (unless the entire country has melted by then, in which case it may be somewhat later). Many obituarists have noted […]

29 January 200929 January 2009 · Main Posts

Unusual Work launch

Jeff Sparrow

YOU (singular/plural) are invited to the launch of UNUSUAL WORK !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! No 7 !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! by collective effort press edited by TT.O. ——— An evening of EXPERIMENTAL PERFORMANCES, POETRY, PROSE, POWERPOINTS, MUSIC, AND MORE!!! —————– FRIDAY 6th FEBRUARY 2009 7:30 pm on Uptown jazz café 177 Brunswick St Fitzroy (upstairs) —————– FEATURING Maxine Clarke, Jessica Wilkinson, […]

29 January 2009 · Main Posts

a taste of things to come

Jeff Sparrow

It was forty-one degrees in Melbourne yesterday. It’s supposed to be forty-three today and the same again tomorrow. Weather is not climate and swallows don’t make summers and so on and so forth. Nonetheless, it’s a context that encourages one to pay attention to this little cheery press release (ht Robert Merkel at LP): A […]

29 January 2009 · Main Posts

‘we are not going to show restraint anymore’

Jeff Sparrow

Last time: The indiscriminate attacks of the Israeli occupying forces resulted in a high fatality rate of 1325 Palestinians and 5320 injured. According to the PRCS most updated statistics the fatalities included 446 children, 110 women and 108 elderly while the injured consisted of 1855 children and 795 women. According to the main three Palestinian […]

28 January 200928 January 2009 · Main Posts

down with our furry oppressors

Jeff Sparrow

You might not have heard but the Left hates cats. No word yet on the line on chickens.

27 January 200927 January 2009 · Main Posts

more on the Pope and anti-Semitism

Jeff Sparrow

I’ve written a longer (and more thought through) version of the post below for today’s Crikey. It’s free, I think — you can read it here. The guts of it are this: though the media attention has been about the Pope rescinding the excommunication of a single Holocaust-denying bishop from the Society of St Pius X, the […]

25 January 2009 · Main Posts

the rehabilitation of a Holocaust denier

Jeff Sparrow

Meet Mr Richard Williamson: “I believe there were no gas chambers… I think that 200,000 to 300,000 Jews perished in Nazi concentration camps but none of them by gas chambers,” he told SVT television in an interview that was recorded in Germany last November. “There was not one Jew killed by the gas chambers. It […]

24 January 200924 January 2009 · Main Posts

Saturday chicken blogging

Jeff Sparrow

What are you looking at?

23 January 200923 January 2009 · Main Posts

John Docker and Ned Curthoys: An Open Letter

Jeff Sparrow

John Docker and regular Overland contributor Ned Curthoys are distributing the open letter below on behalf of their newly formed Committee for the Dismantling of Zionism: J’Accuse: Open Letter to Kevin Rudd Prime Minister of Australia Dear Prime Minister, We are part of an increasing number of people around the world of Jewish descent who […]

22 January 2009 · Main Posts

summer read

Jeff Sparrow

For the next few days, I’m blogging with my sister Jill at the State Library site, as part of its Summer Read program.

21 January 2009 · Main Posts

Gaza: Beating to the rhythms of the US electoral cycle

Jeff Sparrow

From Crikey, Monday: To be honest, this came out a bit half-cooked. But, hey, it’s January. So the killing in Gaza ends as it began, to a timetable determined less by events in the region than the rhythms of the US electoral cycle. The latest round of carnage began, of course, back in November when […]

20 January 200920 January 2009 · Main Posts

sing it, kids: Bush was right!

Jeff Sparrow

It must be very strange to be President Bush. A man of extraordinary vision and brilliance approaching to genius, he can’t get anyone to notice. He is like a great painter or musician who is ahead of his time, and who unveils one masterpiece after another to a reception that, when not bored, is hostile. […]

20 January 2009 · Main Posts

resorting to violence

Jeff Sparrow

Missed this when it first appeared (ht Lenin’s Tomb). Here’s a statistical study of ceasefires between Israel and the Palestinians. How do they end? Is it because the Islamofascist-we-worship-death-while-you-worship-life Palestinians just can’t help themselves in their insane desire for the blood of Israelis? No, not so much. [T]his analysis shows that it is overwhelmingly Israel […]

19 January 200921 January 2009 · Main Posts

Gaza ceasefire and the US elections

Jeff Sparrow

I’ve got a piece on the relationship between Gaza and the US elections up at Crikey today, though I think it’s behind the subscriber firewall. One thing I meant to note in that article but didn’t (cos I’m brain dead today) was the article unearthed by Politico: a piece written by Barack Obama when he […]

18 January 200918 January 2009 · Main Posts

The Course of the Heart

Jeff Sparrow

I’m currently reading M. John Harrison’s The Course of the Heart. It opens like this: When I was a tiny boy I often sat motionless in the garden, bathed in sunshine, hands flat on the rough brick of the garden path, waiting with a prolonged, almost painful expectation for whatever would happen, whatever was contained […]

17 January 200917 January 2009 · Main Posts

why you should be at the rally for Gaza on Sunday

Jeff Sparrow

A few days ago, the NYT‘s Tom Friedman approvingly described Israel’s strategy against Hezbollah as follows: Israel basically said that when dealing with a nonstate actor, Hezbollah, nested among civilians, the only long-term source of deterrence was to exact enough pain on the civilians — the families and employers of the militants — to restrain […]

17 January 200917 January 2009 · Main Posts

Saturday morning chicken blogging

Jeff Sparrow

As the chickens had their breakfast this morning, they were stalked by the ferocious kitteh from next door, who spent half an hour or so sitting on the fence deciding whether or not to pounce on them from a great height. Naturally, watching it conclude that four hungry chickens were more than a match for […]

16 January 200916 January 2009 · Main Posts

launch of Sleepers Almanac No Five

Jeff Sparrow

If you’re in Melbourne, you might want to attend the launch of Sleepers Almanac No Five. Sleepers has become a Melbourne institution and its events are always rambunctious affairs. Overland‘s Kalinda Ashton has a story in this year’s almanac (and I’m sure the rest of it’s good, too). Details below: Launch of the latest Sleepers Almanac […]

16 January 2009 · Main Posts

best internet thing ever

Jeff Sparrow

Maybe the whole world already knows about this but I’ve just discovered Livestation. You download a little viewer thing and suddenly you have free live access to just about every cable news service. As well as the BBC and CSPAN and the rest, you can watch the Aljazeera English channel. It’s the only network with […]

15 January 200915 January 2009 · Main Posts

The Humpty Dumpty gang

Jeff Sparrow

My piece from today’s Crikey has been reprinted at Webdiary, which means, I guess, that it’s probably OK to republish here. Yesterday, the Washington Post gave Bob Woodward the front page for a story in which Susan J Crawford, the convening authority for Bush’s military commissions acknowledged the use of torture at Guantanamo Bay. “We […]

14 January 2009 · Main Posts

why Overland is free online

Jeff Sparrow

In a postscript to her review of Overland 193, Angela Meyer notes: ‘PS: It looks like you can read all of Overland online now. Don’t know how it will help the subscriptions, but it’s all here.’ Her question raises a series of issues with which all literary journals are, one imagines, currently grappling. How should a print journal relate to the […]

14 January 2009 · Main Posts

fight for your right to stupidity

Jeff Sparrow

Below is another Crikey piece from a few days back, on the media career of a certain ‘Joe the Plumber’ and what it says about contemporary conservatism. It should, however, be updated by the inclusion of Joe’s remarkable statement outlining the role of the media in times of conflict: To be honest with you, I […]

13 January 2009 · Main Posts

tasers: sexy, futuristic and lethal

Jeff Sparrow

From Crikey, last week: If you want to see George Bush get tasered (and let’s face it, who doesn’t!), check out Huffington Post today. Actually, that’s not quite right: it’s the luckless Colin Powell who receives the volts while Bush just gets pepper sprayed. OK, so it’s not really Powell and Bush but Jeffrey Wright […]

12 January 2009 · Main Posts

call for submissions

Jeff Sparrow

A new publication searching for writers: Wai is a new quarterly newspaper looking for contributions. Wai means ‘hey’ in Pitantjari. The aim of Wai is to raise attention to issues that aren’t written about enough on a national and regional level. This means the contents of Wai are predominately focused on human rights, social justice […]

12 January 200912 January 2009 · Main Posts

‘like a headbutt to the chest’

Jeff Sparrow

That’s Angela ‘Literary Minded’ Meyer on Eva Sallis’ story ‘Death Sentence’ from Overland 193. You can read the story here. Meyer’s review begins: Another stimulating issue of a journal that dares to challenge you. By this I don’t mean just political stimulation (thought there is plenty of that there) but through non-mainstream points of observation.Overland generally gives you a variety […]

11 January 200911 January 2009 · Main Posts

‘this war-crazed Pig had your brother killed’

Jeff Sparrow

In the New York Times book pages, Caleb Crain reviews Tales for Little Rebels: A Collection of Radical Children’s Literature by Julia L. Mickenberg and Philip Nel, two American academics. He writes: the tentacles of the left reach deep. Crockett Johnson, creator of the innocuous-seeming “Harold and the Purple Crayon,” was an editor at The […]

10 January 2009 · Main Posts

Gaza: the Australian connection

Jeff Sparrow

Who knew? Mark Regev, the man who pops up on your TV to suavely justify each fresh atrocity in Gaza, hails from Melbourne. His Wiki entry runs: Born Mark Freiberg in Australia to Martin and Freda Freiberg, he is a graduate of Mount Scopus Memorial College, received his Bachelor’s degree in Political Science and History […]

9 January 20099 January 2009 · Main Posts

Guernica, Gaza and the disappearance of shock

Jeff Sparrow

As everyone knows, in the wake of the bombing of a small Basque town by German and Italian planes during the Spanish Civil War, Picasso produced the painting Guernica. This astonishing three-dimensional rendition of his canvas allows us to see anew a perhaps overly familiar image: the screaming mouths, the outstretched hands, the horror and […]

8 January 2009 · Main Posts

another one gone

Jeff Sparrow

Ron Asheton, RIP. The bizarre contrast between the announcer in the clip below and the act he’s describing perfectly illustrates the Stooges’ significance.

7 January 20097 January 2009 · Main Posts

state of Australian culture

Jeff Sparrow

Someone just alerted me to the fantastic series New Matilda has been running on the state of Australian culture, a discussion that dovetails nicely with some of the pieces Overland has published recently. The most recent piece by Ben Eltham is particularly good. He writes: The consistent issue running through the “state of the cultural […]

7 January 2009 · Main Posts

round-up of Windschuttle discussion

Jeff Sparrow

I don’t think this thing’s nearly as important as what’s happening in Gaza but, still, in in these times, it’s good to have the odd laugh. The mainstream media discussion includes articles in the Oz, the Age and the Sydney Morning Herald. In the SMH, David Marr opens memorably: AFTER a terrible two hours, Keith […]

6 January 20096 January 2009 · Main Posts

the biter gets bit

Jeff Sparrow

Margaret Simons has a corker of a story in today’s Crikey: Keith Windschuttle, the editor of the conservative magazine Quadrant, has been taken in by a hoax intended to show that he will print outrageous propositions. This month’s edition of Quadrant contains a hoax article purporting to be by “Sharon Gould”, a Brisbane based New […]

6 January 2009 · Main Posts

phone novels and the future of literary fiction

Jeff Sparrow

When I was in the USA a few months back, the only novels I saw anyone reading were so-called ‘street fiction’. The Library Journal notes: One of the hottest literary phenomena of recent years has been the explosion of what has been variously termed hip-hop, street, or urban fiction. Especially popular with younger African Americans, […]

5 January 2009 · Main Posts

The Gaza Strip: Arabs don’t count

Jeff Sparrow

There’s a piece of mine in today’s Crikey, reiterating some of the stuff posted on this site. It begins like this: Here’s a headline from Israel Today that you didn’t see in many local papers: ‘US, Australia back Gaza strike; rest of the world doesn’t.’ Yes, another Coalition of the Willing has been assembled and, […]

4 January 20094 January 2009 · Main Posts

US, Australia back Gaza strike; rest of the world doesn’t

Jeff Sparrow

A headline from Israel Today, from late last year: ‘US, Australia back Gaza strike; rest of the world doesn’t’. If that doesn’t trigger memories of the Man of Steel shoulder-to-shoulder with George Bush in 2003, here’s another Iraq flashback: they’re lying about aluminum tubes again. Consider the following piece of Israeli war porn: Israel posted […]

4 January 2009 · Main Posts

2009 PressPress Chapbook Award

Jeff Sparrow

This may be of interest to Overland readers: The news is that after a successful Award in 2008 the PressPress Chapbook Award will run again in 2009! The Award is for an unpublished chapbook length manuscript of poems. The winning manuscript will receive $500 and chapbook publication with PressPress. The closing date is 31 May 2009. […]

3 January 2009 · Main Posts

Vincent Ford RIP

Jeff Sparrow

The songwriter Vincent Ford died a few days ago and I kept meaning to post this but forgot. So now here it is.

3 January 20093 January 2009 · Main Posts

proportionality

Jeff Sparrow

A typical headline: ‘Israel Attacks New Hamas Targets as Gaza Rockets Hit Ashkelon‘. Of course, the ostensible objectivity (on the one hand, the IDF; on the other, Hamas rockets) obscures the most basic feature of this unfolding tragedy – the gross disproportionality of suffering. Latest estimates are that 400 Palestinians have been killled and 2000 […]

2 January 20092 January 2009 · Main Posts

civilisation

Jeff Sparrow

In the Australian today, Martin Peretz froths and raves about the need for Israel’s attack on Gaza to go on – and on and on and on. Why? Well, the Palestinian leaders, don’t you know, are not ‘civilised’. A ceasefire can sometimes be had between civilised governments. But why isn’t anyone pressing the US and […]

1 January 2009 · Main Posts

free fire zone

Jeff Sparrow

Lenin’s Tomb points out something truly remarkable about the ongoing (happy 2009!) carnage in Gaza: the most widely quoted figure for civilian casualties automatically excludes men. The ABC explains: The United Nations says 320 people have been killed in Gaza, including 62 women and children, and around 1,400 injured. “[The 62 figure] does not include […]

31 December 200831 December 2008 · Main Posts

2008: make it stop already

Jeff Sparrow

I was going to write something about President Bush’s September address to the United Nations, a speech in which the man who launched a war which killed something over a million people explained to the leaders of the world that ‘no cause can justify the deliberate taking of innocent human life’ (h/t Nir Rosen). But […]

30 December 200830 December 2008 · Main Posts

from Iraq to Gaza

Jeff Sparrow

The Israeli newspaper Haaretz described the blitz on Gaza as a ‘massive attack much along the lines of what the Americans termed “shock and awe” during their invasion of Iraq in March 2003′. That’s right – shock and awe. Nearly six years after the carnage in Iraq, it’s all happening again: an illegal campaign of […]

29 December 200830 December 2008 · Main Posts

Palestinians don’t count

Jeff Sparrow

What’s happening in Gaza would not be possible in any other context. But the Palestinians have been demonised so long that there’s a sizeable chunk of the political class prepared to justify any action against them. In Salon today, Glenn Greenwald takes as an example the output of the execrable Marty Peretz, the editor of […]

28 December 200829 December 2008 · Main Posts

Gaza

Jeff Sparrow

Here’s the Google satellite photo of Rafah, Gaza, where many of the Israeli attacks took place. View Larger Map Even at that resolution, you can get a sense of Gaza’s population density (said to be one of the highest in the world), with one and a half million people packed into about 360 square kilometres. […]

27 December 2008 · Main Posts

waltz with Bashir

Jeff Sparrow

‘Waltz with Bashir’ is getting rave reviews overseas and from the trailer you can understand why. Aside from anything else, the animation just looks extraordinary. There’s an interview with its director Ari Folman in Salon that’s well worth reading.

26 December 200828 December 2008 · Main Posts

Xmas card from hydrogen bomb tests, Marshall Islands, 1952

Jeff Sparrow

Now that’s the spirit of the season!

24 December 200824 December 2008 · Main Posts

a nice Christmas message

Jeff Sparrow

So the Pope thinks that defending heterosexuality is as important as saving the world’s rainforests from destruction. He might equally have said that, like most religious leaders, he sees saving heterosexuality as far more important than the silly old environment. Google Fight represents rather neatly his relative interest in the two topics. Of course, it’s […]

23 December 2008 · Main Posts

they always think they know best

Jeff Sparrow

According to a government-commissioned report, the Rudd government’s plans to censor the internet will not work, will significantly slow speeds and will prevent access to legitimate sites. All-in-all, then, it’s quite a winner. The report says the filters would slow the internet (as much as 87 per cent by some measures), be easily bypassed, and […]

22 December 200822 December 2008 · Main Posts

Most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people

Jeff Sparrow

The poet Adrian Mitchell died recently. Here’s an astonishing clip of him performing his best-known poem. A snippet from the Guardian‘s obituary. The poet and playwright Adrian Mitchell, in whom the legacies of Blake and Brecht coalesce with the zip of Little Richard and the swing of Chuck Berry, has died of heart failure at […]

20 December 200822 December 2008 · Main Posts

into old rhyme

Jeff Sparrow

Yesterday, I wrote a list of my top five books for a promotion thing that the City Library is doing. It’s not online yet but most of the books were ones that had been important for projects on which I’d been working. I listed The Poems of Lesbia Harford, for instance, because I’d written a […]

19 December 200815 November 2011 · Right Side payment page

prices

Jeff Sparrow

prices One Year (Individual) AU$54 (no GST) Pensioner, Concession, Student AU$40 (no GST) Current Issue AU$14.95 (includes GST and postage within Australia) Back Issue AU$8.80 (includes GST and postage within Australia) Overseas AU$96 (no GST, includes postage) Griffith Review & Overland offer AU$114 (includes GST) Meanjin & Overland offer AU$114 (no GST) Wet Ink & […]

18 December 2008 · Main Posts

Manning Clark, agent of influence?

Jeff Sparrow

Reposting an old Crikey piece, partly just to test the new site functionality. “I believe [Manning Clark’s Order of Lenin] was conferred on him in secret by the Soviet ambassador at the Soviet embassy in Canberra.” That’s Peter Kelly from last Friday’s Australian. The opinion pages at the Oz provide a convivial home for folks who believe all […]

17 December 200819 December 2008 · Main Posts

first Rupert, then Overland

Jeff Sparrow

We learned yesterday that an edited version of the Overland conversation between Christos Tsiolkas and Antony Loewenstein will be broadcast on Radio National over summer. It’ll be on Thursday 15 January at around 6:30pm – just following Rupert Murdoch’s final Boyer lecture.

17 December 200819 December 2008 · Main Posts

sock and awe

Jeff Sparrow

Via Firedoglake, reports that Muntader Al Zaida, the journalist who threw a shoe at Bush, is in custody with serious injuries. Iraqi blogger Raed in the Middle writes: Albaghdadia, the TV channel where the Iraqi Journalist Montather Al-Zeidi works, reports that an Iraqi MP (Ms. Zainab Al-Kanani) informed them that Montather’s hand was broken in […]

14 December 2008 · Main Posts

not so funny now

Jeff Sparrow

Found this at Crooks and Liars. I have no idea who Peter Schiff is but it’s worth watching the clip just for the reaction of the financial experts when, a year or so ago, he suggests that the bubble of the American economy is about to burst. In some of the segments, the other guests […]

13 December 200813 December 2008 · Main Posts

this is one ugly foreigner

Jeff Sparrow

Every now and then, the travel sections of the newspapers publish one of those snotty stories about comical English translations on signs in Asia. This story, from the Independent, is a fantastic variant. There were red faces on the editorial board of one of Germany’s top scientific institutions, the Max Planck Institute, after it ran […]

12 December 200812 December 2008 · Main Posts

best. title. ever.

Jeff Sparrow

What I’m reading. d d d d d d d

11 December 2008 · Main Posts

tributes to Dorothy Porter

Jeff Sparrow

Richard Watts Jill Jones The Australian She was proud to be a self-supporting poet who never received a grant from the Literature Board of the Australia Council. She had studied to be a teacher but then subsidised her poetry by lecturing part time at university. “In the past I’ve worked very, very hard for very […]

10 December 200810 December 2008 · Main Posts

terrible news

Jeff Sparrow

We just received this: Dorothy Porter died in Melbourne this morning from complications due to cancer. She was 54. A writer at the height of her powers, Dorothy’s most recent publication was EL DORADO, her fifth verse novel. It was shortlisted for the Dinny O’Hearn Poetry Prize (Age Book of the Year Award), the Adelaide […]

10 December 2008 · Main Posts

over there

Jeff Sparrow

The misbegotten occupation of Iraq has now entered a new phase, with the Iraqi parliament finally approving a new security pact with the United States. Parliament’s deliberations took place against the backdrop of the huge anti-American demonstrations of the Sadrists (there’s some extraordinary photos of them here). The Sadrist MPs voted against the pact, on […]

9 December 2008 · Main Posts

Young Liberals’ senate inquiry fails

Jeff Sparrow

A piece of mine in Crikey yesterday: Last week, the Young Liberal-inspired Senate Inquiry into academic bias dribbled to a predictable close. The Age reported: The committee found Liberal student organisations were the main agitators for the inquiry and their submissions had a strongly “undergraduate” tone. “Indeed, the committee believes that the case that Make Australia […]

6 December 2008 · Main Posts

everything must pass

Jeff Sparrow

One tends to think of books as so permanent but it ain’t necessarily so.

5 December 20085 December 2008 · Main Posts

More Overland-Meanjin soccer action

Jeff Sparrow

Courtesy of Sophie Cunningham and the Meanjin crew, here’s some action photos from the Great Overland–Meanjin soccer game. Speaking of which, the new edition of Meanjin is out now. The website glosses it as follows: In the first of our series of CAL/Meanjin cultural essays, Lynden Barber explores the film festival scene and Anthony Burke […]

Published in Overland Issue 189 Summer 2007 · Uncategorized

Theatre of war

Jeff Sparrow

I rang the bell at a pleasant house in Greensborough, in Melbourne’s northern suburbs, and a soldier from the Great War answered. During our email exchanges I’d imagined Andrew Nolte as hefty, gruff and middle-aged, an impression that even survived a couple of phone calls. I didn’t anticipate that someone boasting the accoutrements of a […]